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IN QUEST OF REALITY 


BEING <a OF PRI} GE y, 


THE WARRACK LECTURES ON PREACHING \\()\/2() 1996. 

Ds GIS EDAN Han ORR A ABDI LS) x 

OF THE UNITED FREE CHURCH OF SCOTLAND O@y¢4) EWS 
SESSION 1923-24 | 







BY THF REV. 


JAMES ’REID, M.A. 


ST. ANDREW’S PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH, EASTBOURNE 
Author of The Victory of God, etc. 


NEW we YORK 


GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY 


MADE AND PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN BY MORRISON AND GIBB LTD., EDINBURGH 


PREACH 


_ THESE lectures were delivered in the United’ 
Free Church Colleges of Edinburgh, Glasgow, : 
and Aberdeen, in the early months of 1924.. 
My only excuse for giving them printed form, 
is the very kind response with which they met 
when they were delivered, and the requests that 
were then made that they might be published. 

It is impossible to achieve freshness in a 
task which has produced such volumes as 
those of Dale and Phillips Brooks, to mention 
only two of a lecture series which has done so 
much to secure the spiritual and intellectual 
elevation of the preaching ministry. 

I confess that I began to prepare myself 
for writing these lectures of mine, by taking 
down from my shelves all the works on 
preaching which I possess, but after dipping 
into them, I foresaw that to re-read them 
would make it impossible for me to make 
any progress. I therefore set them aside and 
determined to speak of the ministry as, from . 
my own limited point of view and experience, ° 
it has appeared to myself. One only of the 


vi IN QUEST OF REALITY 


lectures is devoted to the technique of the 
- art, as I cannot imagine that they should be 
‘ confined to hints for preachers, and I have 
- sought, in the limited space allowed, to deal 
.with some wider aspects of the subject. 

I have chosen the title which appears on 
this volume because it seemed to convey most 
‘clearly the object I had in mind, which 
‘was to discuss how a preacher may achieve 
‘reality in his work. The word “reality ”’ 
may be in some danger in these days of 
being overworked, but the craving for it 
points to a cause which in part at least is 
responsible for the separation of pulpit from 
pew and for not a little of the drift from 
organized Christianity. 

These lectures were written for students 
in preparation, but if the book should bring 
any help to any of my brethren in the 
ministry, I shall feel that my hesitation about 
publication has been wisely overruled. 

I am greatly indebted to my friends, Rev. 
Professor Fearon Halliday, B.A., of Selly 
Oak Colleges, Birmingham, for his sugges- 
tions, and Mr. A. W. Yeo, of Hodcombe, 
Eastbourne, for reading the MSS. and proofs. 


TR 


CONTENTS 


LECTURE I 


THE PREACHER’S TASK 


LECTURE II 


THE PREACHER’S AUDIENCE. 


LECTURE III 


SoME TYPES OF PREACHING. 


LECTURE IV 


THE TECHNIQUE OF PREACHING 


LECTURE V 


THE PREACHER HIMSELF 


PAGE 


49 


84 


21 


163 





LECTURE I 
THE PREACHER’S TASK 


A couRSE of lectures on preaching may 
appear to beg two very important questions. 
The first is whether preaching is worth while: 
—whether it still retains in these days the 
urgency and importance of a special vocation. 
The other question is, granted the value of 
preaching, is it the kind of art which can- 
be taught or learned? There are people 
to-day who are sceptical on both these 
points, and doubts about them have stolen 
into the mind of many a preacher and are 
steadily undermining his confidence. The 
“foolishness of preaching” is a phrase that 
has never lost its sting, and it never had 
more point than it has for multitudes to-day. 
How much of that is due to the fact that 
preaching has in many cases lost touch with 
real life, it is difficult to tell. Few would 


deny that many people are preaching who: 
I 


2 IN QUEST OF REALITY 


‘have little or nothing to say—nothing, that 
is, which would spontaneously burn its way 
into utterance. We can be sure that the 
world simply will not take it for granted 
that preaching is a man’s job, except as we 
convince them of the fact by the worth of 
our preaching ; and that will be worth little 
if we ourselves have lost the conviction that 
it is worth while or do not feel that its 
technique is so far within our capacity that 
we can face a working world with the self- 
respect of ‘‘a workman that needeth not to 
be ashamed.’ The day is fast approaching 
when no man will be able to hold up his 
head in the face of public opinion unless he 
knows he is making some worthy contribu- 
tion to life. Whether, in the eyes of a certain 
section, the preacher’s work will ever be any- 
thing else than a sort of social parasitism is 
a question with which we need not concern 
ourselves here. The important thing is not 
what other people think about our work; 
it is whether we ourselves are convinced 
that our vocation is a valid and worthy form 
of self-expression such as we can put our 
whole manhood into and such that, whatever 


THE PREACHER’S TASK 3 


its apparent success or want of success, we 
can lift up our hearts to God without 
reproach. 


The first essential, then, of real preaching 
is the conviction that it is worth while. 
That is essentially a spiritual experience. 
It is born of our own experience of the gospel 
—our own vision of the truth, and nothing 
else will give it. ‘“‘ Necessity is laid upon 
me’: that is the final reason for preaching. 
We preach because we must. The truth 
compels us. We cannot go deeper into 
the matter than that. We cannot con- 
duct a preaching ministry for a lifetime 
on. less. 

But there are certain ideas drifting about 
in the air to-day which tend to cut the nerve 
of a preacher’s confidence in his own task. 
There is, for instance, the idea that the 
prevalence of books and newspapers which 
more or less deal with religion and the conduct 
of life make preaching unnecessary. Even 
if it were true that people can find enough 
light on the spiritual side of their nature from 
reading, the same argument would make all 


4 IN QUEST OF REALITY 


political speaking, and all kinds of public 
address, unnecessary. But we do not need 
to look very deeply into the mind of the 
average man to have the idea dissipated that 
he knows anything either very much or 
very deeply about God; while the average 
journalist who deals with religion is often 
about twenty-five years behind the times 
and spends half his energy belabouring 
views which are almost extinct among 
thoughtful religious people. 

Another argument against the necessity of 
preaching comes from the modern growth 
of psycho-analysis. Preaching seems so im- 
personal, while the greatest need in the 
healing of souls seems to be the need of 
individual dealing. The pastoral office is 
assuming, as it ought to do, much greater 
importance, and some are asking whether 
this is not the real work of the ministry. 
One answer to this objection is that there 
will be plenty of opportunity in any well- 
ordered ministry for this kind of work. In 
proportion as our preaching ministry is 
effective, the need for spending time upon 
individual cases will become more clamant. 


THE PREACHER’S TASK 5 


But apart from this, there is no better or 
healthier self-analysis than that which a 
man makes for himself in the light of the 
revelation of Christ. The true preacher has 
a function as a healer of sick souls far more 
effectual and covering a wider range than 
he imagines. ‘“‘God singles out unit by 
unit ’’ even while we are preaching to a 
multitude, and there is no other way in 
which His truth can be so effectually set 
free to become the vehicle of the delicate 
personal dealing of the Spirit of God with 
men. It is a common experience for people 
to tell us that we seemed to be dealing with 
their very case, sometimes even accusing us 
of preaching at them, when as a matter of 
fact we were quite unconscious of their 
presence. There are instances which every 
preacher can give of cases where God has 
been manifestly at work in a way that 
has awed and humbled his spirit. Good 
preaching is extraordinarily individual and 
personal without our knowing it, for: 
the werect Of ‘all’ true ’ preaching” is ~*to" 
bring people face to face with God, Who - 
searches the hearts of men far more surely 


6 IN QUEST OF REALITY 


than even our best analytical skill can 
accomplish. 

There is yet another idea which is sapping 
the confidence of some men in the ministry 
and, as we all know, is one which it is part 
of our business to teach—that all callings 
rank the same with God and that the age 
needs, above everything else, men who will 
carry the Spirit of Christ into the ordinary 
business of daily life. There are countless 
‘positions in business or professional life 
which present strategic points for advancing 
the Kingdom of God—positions which seem 
to offer the chance of a larger life and a wider 
opportunity than that of a minister, and we 
are tempted to wonder if we have not 
made a mistake. We see some who rubbed 
shoulders with us at college filling these 
positions ; we think of the poverty of result 
which often seems to attend our own ministry. 
We come to point after point in the ordinary 
course of preaching where we appear to have 
worked out one seam of truth and find our- 
selves faced with the need of driving a new 
_ mine with hardly a glimmer of ore, and we 
are tempted to lose heart. There are times 


THE PREACHER’S TASK 7 


when many a minister feels like writing his 
resignation. This temptation to doubt the 
validity of our call comes to all of us ; it is an 
inevitable result of the nature of the call to 
the ministry. We have to meet and over- 
come there the suggestion which besets all 
spiritual experience, that there is something 
in it of illusion. It is quite possible that this 
temptation may have been part of the desert 
experience of Christ, if the situation there 
were truly understood. We crave for signs 
that never come, and would not be of God if 
they did. This temptation can only be met 
by resources which are spiritual: it is an 
hour when we need to seek the recovery of 
our spirit in God. One thing is sure: the 
most fatal thing we can do is to doubt 
the validity of our call, or go back on a 
spiritual experience which sent us on the way. 
It is enough that we have put our hand 
to the plough. There were two ways, you 
remember, out of the Slough of Despond— 
which always lies somewhere or other on the 
road of a spiritual adventure. The one is 
backward to the place from which we have 
come. The other is forward, though it 


8 IN QUEST OF REALITY 


‘be but blindly; but the forward way is the 
- only way on which we can count on grasping 
the Hand of God. 

Preaching is worth our while and all our 
while, however often we be beset by the 
‘ whisper of doubt. Even if we were never 
‘meant to preach (supposing any man could 
‘say that with assurance—which is question- 
-able) once we have started, the thing to do 
is to accept our situation : it is ‘‘ to stop our 
ears against paralysing terrors and run the 
race that is set before us with a steady 
mind.’ Above all, the way out of depression 
is to open our eyes afresh to the wonder of 
our message, which is the real root of the 
preacher's confidence and the only secret of 
his power. For what is preaching ? Phillips 
‘ Brooks defines it as truth mediated through 
personality. It is the message of God com- 
municated by a person to persons, in public 
address. It takes two things to make it 
effective—the message and the man, and the 
one reacts on the other. The man shapes 
the message, but it will only be real preach- 
ing if at the same time the message is shaping 
the man. 


THE PREACHER’S TASK 9 


I 


What, then, is the preacher’s task? That 
is our first inquiry. Our answer to it will be 
found in some clear view of our message. 


For our task is to proclaim a message; and + 


to the message, both the method and the 
technique are subordinate ; it is of little use 
thinking about these till we are clear about 
the message, for that will both make the 
preacher and shape his method. 

Stevenson speaks of the struggle of truth 
“in a man’”’ seeking expression: how it 
“ tears and blinds him,”’ rending its way into 
his books. The truth we have to speak will 
shape our utterance. It will determine a 
good deal of our method. It will, for instance, 
determine what kind of arguments shall or 
shall not be used. It will determine how a 
sermon shall be built up, what will be its 
emphasis, the direction of the appeal, the 
effect we are to aim at, the kind of response 
we seek to awaken. There is a kind of 
appeal which no preacher with a real message 
will ever use. There are methods which the 
truth will banish from the pulpit. There is 


% 


10 IN QUEST OF REALITY 


a kind of success of which we will be ashamed. 
‘ We cultivate, in time, a taste which censors 
and excludes vulgarities. On the other hand, 
there are appeals which might be banned by 
a severe and hypersensitive taste, which a 
preacher in earnest will employ without 
scruple. 
‘In my college days, our deepest failure, if 
‘ my own experience of the kind of atmosphere 
‘then prevalent among the students is any 
- guide, lay along the line of a too rigid code 
- of preaching conventions. A man who could 
hold an audience was suspected by his fellow- 
students of a defective intellectual outfit. 
The truth was not supposed either to tear 
or blind in the process of being born; it 
was often expected to freeze a man into a 
rigidity that passed for intellectualism. The 
favourite was the highbrow, who has been 
well defined as “‘a person who is educated 
beyond the limits of his natural intelligence.” 
The preacher’s message is the revelation 
of God, and of God supremely in Jesus 
Christ, in all Christ was and did. We cannot 
better Paul’s summary of his own message 
to the Corinthians—“ Jesus Christ and Him 


THE PREACHER’S TASK 11 


who is the crucified,” to use Deissman’s 
translation. That may sound a little narrow 
and suggest the evangelism of the older school, 
with its theories of the atonement from 
which we have moved away. We should not 
be deterred on that account from facing the 
fact that the heart of any real gospel is there. 
It is not our business, of course, to preach a 
theory, but a fact creating an experience ; 
and the creative redeeming fact is there. It 
is the character and activity of God towards 
men, revealed in Jesus Christ, through His 
life, death, and resurrection. And the 
central vision of God which Jesus came to 
bring is that of the holy, personal Father. 
Fverything in real religion springs from that 
—our view of the world, our valuation of 
human personality, our way of duty, our 
vision of immortality. Our business is to » 
reveal God in Christ through our preaching, - 
in such a way as to bring men and women - 
into right relations with Him. 

This seems the veriest commonplace ; but 
even were it so, this central message remains 
the most vital need of the pulpit to-day. To 
say that it is commonplace is no argument 


12 IN QUEST OF REALITY 


against emphasizing it; as Dale said, it is 
the great commonplaces by which we live. 
Freshness and vitality in the pulpit are not 
to be achieved by novel or outré themes, but 
by the re-thinking and fresh presentation of 
the oldest of themes. And one wonders 
whether it is so commonplace as it appears. 
The more deeply one looks into the mind of 
this generation, the more one realizes that 
people are wrong because they are out of 
relation with God; and they are out of 
relation with God because they have mis- 
understood the character of God and there- 
fore the nature of right relations with Him. 
All kinds of doubts and mistakes and per- 
plexities can be traced to some wrong idea 
. of God. Most of the perplexities of a theo- 
logical kind which were raised during the 
- war betrayed a mass of ignorance regarding 
- the Christian view of God : ignorance of those 
who looked on Him as dominant impersonal 
force and asked why He did not stop the 
war; and of those who looked on Him as 
genial tolerant benevolence and wondered 
why He ever allowed it to begin; as well as 
of those who regarded it as a judgment 


THE PREACHER’S TASK 13 


definitely sent to punish men for their neglect. 
Many of our people are still worshipping a 
half-pagan deity. The primitive in all of us 
dies hard. There is a good deal of current 
religion that is only baptized superstition and 
it is found in all the churches. With many 
people there is still an unresolved conflict 
between the God of the Old Testament and 
the God of the New. A host of questions 
about prayer and suffering are vexing the 
minds of people who would cease to ask 
them if only they saw God in Christ. And 
the only way to help them is to preach the 
message of God in Christ. Once we have 
seen Him there, we can see Him in His 
dealings with the patriarchs, the kings, and 
the prophets also. But we have no real 
message, no authoritative vision of conduct 
or life or duty, till we see them springing from 
our true relationship to God. All religion 
begins there. When Bradlaugh the atheist 
was elected to the House of Commons, some 
one moved that he be not allowed to take 
his seat because he refused to take the oath 
in the usual form, and remarked that “‘ after 
all, every one believed in a God of some sort 


14 IN QUEST OF REALITY 


or another.’”’ Whereupon Gladstone took up 
the cudgels for liberty, and rejoined that “‘ to 
believe in a God of some sort or another ”’ is 
no religion at all. Who is God? What is 
He like ? What is the “ deep heart-shatter- 
ing secret of His way with us”? ? What kind 
of activity is in the line of His real nature ? 
How does He come to His glory? What do 
we mean by the Divine? And—springing 
from that—what is the true nature of man, 
His child ? How should we bear ourselves 
to one another if we be His children ? What 
does sin mean, in the light of the revelation 
of God in Jesus ? And how does He redeem 
us from it? How do we get back into 
fellowship with Him, and how will that 
fellowship be expressed in the daily round 
and the common task, as well as in the 
corporate relationships and activities of life ? 
There is matter for our preaching here, 
enough to take a lifetime to investigate 
and all our highest powers to unfold and 
proclaim. 

I venture to lay stress on this as the 
very marrow and substance of our preaching, 
not once in a while, but all the time—the 


THE PREACHER’S TASK 15 


proclamation of God the Father and His 
relations with His children. The times in 
which we live demand it as never before. No 
one can look at\the religious world to-day 
without seeing that we are coming to a part- 
ing of the ways. The question at issue is‘ 
whether we are going to recover for our age. 
all that is involved in a sane and healthy. 
Protestantism — despite some unfortunate 
associations of the name—or whether we are ° 
going back to what is really a religion of ° 
magical operation and external authority. - 
The main point at issue in the controversy 
about Church union lies there. The root of 
religious uncertainty lies there. It is really 
a question of the nature of God and His 
relation to men and to His world. Does He 
govern them from without and save men by a 
succour which is independent of the response 
of their own personality and does not require 
the apprehension of truth through their own 
insight? Or, on the other hand, does He rule 
men through love in a free obedience as His 
children, and save them—by no magical 
grace and no external force applied through 
fear or authority—but only through a love 


16 IN QUEST OF REALITY 


that bears their sin and has no other power to 
win them but the persuasions presented in 
the Cross? That is really the question of 
our time which underlies everything. People 
are drifting out of the true Protestant position 
‘ because Protestantism demands insight, and 
a clear and reasonable grasp of the truth in 
this vision of a personal suffering love. We 
simply cannot hold people to a reasonable 
religion unless we set them thinking with 
their own minds. 

Perhaps the gravest charge which can be 
laid against what we may call the Protestant 
section of the Church during the last quarter 
of a century, is that it has not taught the 
people to think. It is often said that the 
sermon occupies too important a place in 
the service, and that too little emphasis is 
laid on the devotional side of worship: and 
this has sometimes been made an excuse 
for people drifting into communions where 
ceremonial occupies a large place, to say 
nothing of their substitution of an ex- 
ternal authority for individual insight in 
the guidance of life. The real remedy 
for this defect in our service does not lie 








THE PREACHER’S TASK 17 


in a poorer quality of preaching. On the 


contrary, it is often the quality of the 
preaching which has produced the true dis- 


satisfaction. Listening to a really good 
sermon may be a very real devotional exer- 
cise. The preaching of the last generation. 
has too often been nebulous, scornful of 
systematic doctrine, aiming only, as a rule, 


at producing a certain inspirational result 


by an emotional uplift, and providing a kind 
of tonic for a depressed or jaded spirit. A 
speaker not long ago at a great religious 


assembly said that he had been listening to 
sermons all his life and the only impression 
they had left on him was a kind of “ grey 
patch on his brain’’! We have become the 
slaves of what is called ‘‘ practical preaching,”’ 


almost to the extent of banishing clear and 
consistent thought. We have been afraid- 
to make people think. The result is that 
preaching has ceased to supply what people 
need if they are to grow strong in the freedom 


of the children of God, as well as grounded 
and settled in a faith which is their own. 


The clamant need of our time is for more 


central preaching — preaching which will 


2 


18 IN QUEST OF REALITY 


educate insight and quicken the springs of 
character in the varied response of children 
to the Father. A traveller tells us of a curious 
mirror of silver he picked up in Japan ; this, 
when flashing the light, reflected, not a mere 
beam, but the image of the god Buddha that 
had been subtly wrought into its texture. 
‘Good preaching should have the supreme 
quality of reflecting the vision of God the 
_ Father. 

It is only through this vision of God that 
we have any key to those perplexities of 
Christian duty which are met in every sphere 
of life. A score of problems of Christian 
conduct await solution. To take only one 
or two—the attitude of men to the industrial 
problem, to the international problem, to 
the problems of crime and war, will all 
depend on the view they take of God and 
-His method and purpose. All life is capable 
‘of being interpreted on this basis of God’s 
Fatherhood revealed in Jesus. Only so seen, 
can life become intelligible. Only so can we 
bring to bear on human strife and unbrother- 
liness the light by which the world can find 
its way to peace and real progress. Only so 


- 


THE PREACHER’S TASK 19 


can we give to men and women the clue to 
the thing they most of all need, which is to 
know the meaning of their own life. It is. 
our business to show them that this message: 
of God’s nature, and the consequent nature’ 
of man, with all that it demands of love and- 
brotherhood, is no airy dream, but the un- 
veiling of basic reality and consequently the: 
only foundation on which we can safely: 
build anything that will stand. For some 
people such a message will literally be a new 
revelation. It will come to them with wonder 
and surprise. Mr. Dan Crawford in one of 
his books tells of the thrill it gave him to 
preach the gospel to people who had never 
heard anything like it before. We will 
experience the same kind of thrill to-day. 
For to many people—people inside our 
churches as well as outside of them—this 
whole view of God’s loving personal relation 
to us, and all it involves, will come as good 
news, with all the glad surprise of light in a 
cloudy day. To others again whose theology 
has been of the older school, it may mean a 
gradual reconstruction of their whole out- 
look on God and on life—a thing not to be 


20 IN QUEST OF REALITY 


attained without some pain and difficulty. 
But whatever the immediate reaction of our 
preaching, we must present this message of 
~God to men in such a way that they shall 
-find all their self-made shelters broken down 
-and their inhibitions taken away. There 
is a love of God in every man, sometimes 
repressed, but always present in experi- 
ence though often unrecognized, which 1s 
waiting to rise up and call God Father in 
deed and in reality. When people, like the 
prodigal, come to themselves, they rise and 
go to the Father, and when they go to the 
Father, they come to themselves. We can do 
nothing for men except in the measure in 
which we relate them to Him. | 
In this task we will, of course, direct our 
message first of all, and all the time, to the 
conversion of the individual, for it is an 
incontrovertible fact that the world in the 
long run can only be changed by changing 
individuals. We must aim at bringing 
. each single one into a right relation with 
.God. Our first objective—indeed our main 
objective—is to seek men and women one 
by one as Jesus sought them and so to 


THE PREACHER’S TASK 21 


find them that they shall seek others. A 
ministry which is not a converting ministry, 
turning men and women individually to God, 
has failed in its most vital task. But we 
have other work to do also. It is to reach - 
the mind of a group—large or small—and’ 
leaven it. From the pulpit we may have 
an opportunity of getting into touch with 
the thinking mind of a community. We 
may leaven them by the truth, raising 
the whole standard of their life, teaching 
new values. Our influence may soak in 
almost unconsciously—till men find them- 
selves reading their newspapers with a 
different outlook—sometimes, it may be, 
changing their newspapers! We may find 
them taking a new stand in a municipal 
election, beginning to think in terms of people 
instead of rates, taking a new line about 
international problems, thinking differently 
about war, growing a conscience about stocks 
and shares, and asking questions about how 
their money is made and what they are doing 
with it when it is made. These results are 
definite and direct fruits of the gospel. We: 
reach people from many different  sides.- 


22 IN QUEST OF REALITY 


+ There are no stereotyped gates into the 
kingdom. 
“For not through eastern windows only | 
When daylight comes, comes in the light ; 

In front, the sun climbs slow, how slowly, 

But westward, look, the land is bright.” 
Both results are to be aimed at in preach- 
ing—the definite personal relationship to 
God in Jesus and the changing of the mind 
and outlook of people till they begin to think 
with the mind of Christ: Sometimes the 
truth first comes home in the sense of a new 
personal relation to God which gradually 
grows till everything in the man’s world is 
changed. Sometimes his world is changed 
bit by bit through a new outlook, and then 
one day he finds God in it: but the work is 
not completely done till both things happen, 
and men and Christ go hand in hand through 

a world which is altogether new. | 
- For that task of relating men to God, the 
"message of God in Christ is our only instru- 
- ment, and it is all we need. We can have no 
other authority in preaching than the truth. 
We can have no other appeal by which to 
win men for the kingdom than the truth ; no 





THE PREACHER’S TASK 23 


other confidence as we face an audience than 
the confidence born of the truth. 


In general cases the first thing we have: 
to do is to get people to see the truth—really. 
_ to see by the eyes of spiritual perception the. 
love of God in Christ. That means, for many, 
a rebirth—a conversion—a real awakening. 
We are confronted to-day with a mass of 
spiritual needs of different kinds; the 
troubles of the soul are many and varied. 
But in one form or another the real trouble 
is blindness. The spiritual perception is 
not quickened. We come to realize in our 
ministry, before long, that people either see 
or they do not see. Sometimes they only see 
dimly, but they see. But, again and again, 
we have to face the fact that they do not see 
at all. Their trouble, as Paul found in the 
case of the Corinthians, is that the message 
is to them either a “ scandal ”’ or a “ piece of 
folly.” They may apprehend it with the 
intelligence, but only as a system of thought. 
It is not a living fact. They do not know 
God. Religion simply does not count at all. 
The message of the love of God in Christ 


a 


24 IN QUEST OF REALITY 


> 


crucified is just “‘ sloppy folly,” as a certain 
distinguished man put it the other day. 
That is, quite frankly, how some people look 
at the message of Jesus. They cannot see 
the truth: they are the heartbreak and the 
perplexity of our ministry, and we find them 
sometimes drifting out of our churches, after 
years of teaching and apparent acquiescence, 
because they have not seen God in Jesus. 
How are we to get hold of them? How are 
we to make them see? Only by the truth 
and the whole truth expressed in the phrase, 


. “Christ and Him crucified.’’ The truth has 


the power to awaken its own sense of need ; 


‘ we can depend on it. It is our business so 


to reveal it as to help them to see. Some one 
said the other day that a rediscovery of what 
Christ meant by faith would bring a revival 
of religion. There is something in that. 
But there is a prior work to be done. Faith 
is only our natural response to the vision of 
God in Jesus. That vision alone will awaken 
faith as a natural result. Can any one really 
see Christ without having the impulse 
awakened to trust Him? And there is a 
moral regenerating power in the message of 


THE PREACHER’S TASK 25 


the truth in Jesus, in the reality of His love 
for men as seen in Calvary—where alone it 
reaches its point of flame against the back- 
eround of human sin—which can melt the 
very hardest heart. There lies our power. 
We are all familiar with the argument for: 
what is called the social gospel. There are 
people so enmeshed in an evil environment 
that they need almost to be dug out before they 
can begin to see the light and to be cared for, 
like a suffocated man, till they are at the 
point where their souls can function normally 
enough to breathe the spiritual atmosphere 
for themselves. But social service can never 
take the place of the message of the gospel 
of God’s love. Social service only reaches 
real effectiveness as it becomes, so to speak, 
the hands and feet of the messengers of God— 
a medium through which the love of God is 
made real, conveying the touch of Jesus. 
As such it is an essential element in the 
revelation of God the Father. But, however. 
far down they be sunk, never for a moment 
let us give people up as beyond the reach of - 
the truth of God just where they are. There : 
is a penetrative power in that light which 


26 IN QUEST OF REALITY 


can reach the deepest dungeon. A wonderful 
illustration of this fact came to light lately 
in a little book called A Gentleman 1n Prison. 
A desperate criminal in a Japanese prison, — 
condemned to death for murder, was visited 
by two lady missionaries. They spoke to- 
him, but found him cold and indifferent. 
They left with him as they went a copy of 
- the New Testament. One day, in boredom 
mixed with curiosity, he took down the New 
Testament and opened it, and the story of 
what happened is told in one of a series of 
letters which he left behind. He began by read- 
ing the Parable of the Lost Sheep. “Still,” 
he says, “‘I was not sufficiently impressed to 
have any special belief in what I was reading. 
I simply thought they were words which any 
preacher might have used. I put the New 
Testament on the shelf again and did not 
read it for some time. A little later, when 
I was tired of doing nothing, I took down the 
book again and began to read. This time 
I read how Jesus was handed over to Pilate, 
was tried unjustly, and put to death by 
crucifixion. As I read this, I began to think. 
This person they called Jesus was evidently 


THE PREACHER’S TASK 27 


a man who at any rate tried to lead others 
into the paths of virtue, and it seemed an in- 
human thing to crucify Him, simply because 
He had different religious opinions from 
others. Even I, hardened criminal that I 
was, thought it a shame that His enemies. 
should have treated Him in this way. 

‘““T went on, and my attention was next 
taken by these words: ‘And Jesus said, 
“ Father, forgive them, for they know not 
what they do.”’’ I stopped. I was stabbed 
to the heart as if pierced by a five-inch nail. 
What did the verse reveal to me? Shall I 
call it the love of the heart of Christ ? Shall 
I call it His compassion? I do not know 
what to call it. I only know that, with 
an unspeakably grateful heart, I believed. 
Through this simple sentence I was led into 
the whole of Christianity. This is how lI 
thought it out. I suppose a man’s greatest 
enemy is the one who seeks to take his life 
from him. There is surely no greater enemy 
than this. Now at the very moment when 
Jesus’ life was being taken from Him, He 
prayed for His enemies to the God of heaven, 
‘Father, forgive them, for they know not 


28 IN QUEST OF REALITY 


what they do.’ What else could I believe — 
but that He was indeed the Son of God?” 

Never mind his rationalizing, if you call it — 
so. The thing that happened was, that he © 
saw God in Jesus the crucified, and seeing — 
Him was changed into another man. There 
is the miracle, for the production of which © 
our preaching is to be the vehicle. And the 
power that can do it, even in a dungeon and 
in a criminal’s heart, is the power of the 
truth breaking in to open the blind eyes. 
It is worth a lifetime’s study and a life laid 
down, to become the instrument of such 
reconciling love, and no art that produces 
any other impression, though it bring us to 
heights of popularity, can compare with the 
preaching of a man who brings even one 
soul into right relations with God. But my 
point is that the truth is its own searchlight ; 
the truth alone, without compromise—with- 
out regard to popular demand. The real 
question about a man’s message is not 
whether it is what the people want, nor even 
whether it is edifying, but whether it is true. 
Our business is with nothing less and with 
nothing more, though of course to see it 


THE PREACHER’S TASK 29 


and present it in all its range and power will 
take all the sinews of our mind and soul. 


I] 


Now with this for a central aim, there are 
certain general rules which I venture to set: 
down. 

1. Our preaching must be clear and simbple.: 
If the truth is to have its appeal, the people 
must see it in the clearest way. Nothing is 
going to reach the conscience which is not 
pellucidly clear to the mind. Some one says 
that “‘ what is spiritually necessary may be 
intellectually unintelligible.’ That is at 
least a very dangerous principle. There is 
a distinct peril lest, having banished magic 
from our cultus, we should enshrine something 
very like it in our vocabulary. “‘ These be 
good words,” says an old woman in Silas 
Marner. We are tempted to use certain 
phrases and terms familiar to ourselves, 
which to the people are either unintelligible, 
or else so crusted, like a ship with barnacles, 
with hoary superstition or pious associa- 
tion of a distinctly unattractive kind, that 
they carry people nowhere. To-day we are 


30 IN QUEST OF REALITY 


denied an advantage which the preachers 
of a couple of generations ago possessed. 
They could safely take for granted a certain 
knowledge of religious phrases and _ theo- 
logical terms derived from home and Sunday- 
school training : such as, for instance, in the 
Shorter Catechism in Scotland. That may, 
or may not, have made for reality. But it 
made it comparatively easy for the preacher 
who, as a preacher must do, dealt largely 
in theology. To-day we can take nothing 
for granted. A person of considerable intel- 
lectual attainments and fairly wide reading 
in theology said to me the other day that we 
preachers take too much for granted. The 
Principal of Mansfield tells how he sent some 
working men to hear a well-known preacher 
in London, and asked them afterwards what 
they thought of it. ‘“‘ Blowed if we could 
understand a word of what the bloke was 
saying,’ was their comment. We shall— 
unfortunately —not be addressing people 
who have so little contact with our world of 
ideas, Sunday after Sunday, but we will be 
humiliated again and again to find how much 
the ordinary congregation often gets out of 


THE PREACHER’S TASK 31 


an address to the children, just because it is 
clear and simple. We must get into the habit 
of refusing to let phrases pass currency for 
thought and do duty for an honest effort 
to reach the audience with our meaning. 
It is fatally easy to use pious phrases that: 
are only a shelter, even to ourselves, for’ 
intellectual sluggishness. And a phrase or 
a sentence may be sublimely true to our- 
selves, yet it may mean precisely nothing 
to the man or woman to whom we are 
talking, or may even mean something which 
is not really Christian. Oliver Wendell 
Holmes says somewhere that a great many 
of our familiar religious terms need to be 
“depolarized,” as he calls it, because their 
associations have so disguised their real 
meaning that people are misled. That was 
half a century ago in New England ; it is far 
truer to-day in Britain. 

It comes to this, then, that we must be 
careful to define our terms. Theology is a 
science that grows by the constant re- 
defining of terms. We will have to explain 
our vocabulary. Not long agoa lady was talk- 
ing to me who had been trying to find her way 


32 IN QUEST OF REALITY — 


in the new psychology. She had read five or 
six books, but she was held up on every other 
page by the fact that she did not know the 
language terms, and she wanted to know if 
there was a simple book which would explain 
them. That is precisely our difficulty in 
preaching. The Bible itself is largely a closed 
book to some people for the same reasons ; 
the Epistles of St. Paul are a striking example. 
There is hardly a phrase of Biblical theology 
which we can take for granted. Take such 
terms as “‘ sin,’ for instance, or “ grace,” or 
“coming to Christ,’ or “the Kingdom of 
God,” or ‘‘ eternal life,’ or ‘“‘ conversion,’ or 
“faith.” What do they mean? This is 
fundamental work; but we will find an 
astonishing response of interest in tackling 
such phrases and giving new meanings to 
old terms. We can preach a whole series 
of sermons, answering questions which have 
thus become elementary. And every one of 
them will be for some people in our congrega- 
tions a window into a new country. It will 
throw floods of light on sealed pages. It will 
unwrap graveclothes to give dead words life. 
Think of the preaching of the first apostles 


THE PREACHER’S TASK 33 


described in the Acts. What was the secret 
of its power? The people acknowledged 
that they heard the apostles “talking, each 
man in his own tongue, of the triumphs of 
God.” Real preaching is talking to people ° 
in their own language of the triumphs of God.. 
Words must stand for real things if preaching 
is to be real. They must not merely be the 
symbols of what, to many people, is either 
a theological figment or an unintelligible 
mystery. Whatever the gift of tongues was, 
clear speech is part of the means by which 
the message of God breaks through every- 
thing and wins its way past “ clay-shuttered 
doors.”’ 


2. A second rule that should be followed- 
is that real preaching must be positive. The: 
truth must be trusted to do its own work: 
of correcting error or of self-defence. Two 
types of sermon commonly err on the negative 
side. The one is the argumentative sermon 
which aims at establishing a case by stating 
objections and meeting them. This type of 
preaching requires the greatest of care. The 
danger is that stating objections for the 

3 


e- 


34 IN QUEST OF REALITY 


purpose of meeting them may only result 
in sowing our own doubts; for the capacity 
of the average hearer to follow an argument 
is limited. There is a place, of course, for 
the apologetic sermon, but it must not be 
forgotten that the sphere of apologetics is 
limited. Its true function is to prepare for 
the evangel, to remove obstacles out of the 
way of the man who is seeking the light. It 
is really only valid and worth while for those 
who “ ask the way to Zion with their faces 
thitherward.”” That is the point. People 
must be sincere; they must be seeking 
truth, before our arguments will help to 
remove their objections. An apologetic 


* sermon is of very little use to a man to whom 
‘doubt is not an agony, and that man is 
-already on the way to the truth. For people 


who want to find the truth, who want to 
believe, but to whom the way is blocked by 
intellectual difficulties, the right kind of 
argument can be an enormous help. It can 
bring a unity into their world, which is 
generally what is needed by those who have 
doubts. Some people stand on the threshold 
of the Kingdom, and it only needs the build- 


THE PREACHER’S TASK 35 


ing of some bridge, or the demolishing of 
some barrier, to bring them into it. They 
are there already in spirit, but they have 


intellectually what the Quakers call “a stop 


in their mind.” A well-known scientist of 
our day confesses, in a little book, that for 
years he had been unable to accept 
Christianity till he found a bridge, as he 
puts it, over the Rubicon into the Christian 
faith. His particular bridge was an argu- 
ment for the truth of the Incarnation. It 
is a bridge which he confesses many others 
might smile at; he is disappointed, in fact, 
because it does not seem to appeal to certain 
learned theologians to whom he has ex- 
plained it. But it served his purpose, which 
was to put down a plank on which his feet 
could cross into the country where his heart 
was really dwelling. Once over, he no longer 
needs it. There is a place in such cases for 
the right kind of apologetic. Or, again, | 
there are people who are uneasy lest their 
faith or their experience should be a kind of 
illusion. They want to have the foundations’ 
examined to see that the structure has its: 
base in a reasonable world. Or, yet again,- 


36 IN QUEST OF REALITY 


there are people who stand outside because 
they have never thought very deeply about 
religion. They have been put off by some 
catchword or some stupid objection which is 
really a blind, though they do not know it. 
And by argument or attack it is possible to 
demolish that barrier and make them think 
of God. We can help a great many people 
just by making them think. 

But, when all is said and done, argu- 


-mentative preaching can never bring a man 


Ca 


into the spiritual world: it cannot be the 


. basis of faith. In the long run the truth 


a 


is the only apologetic for the purposes of 
preaching. All the stock arguments against 
Christianity begin to vanish into thin air 
when a man has seen Jesus. Argument may 
demolish the barriers that hide; it can 
prepare the way of the Lord; it can never 
reveal Him; nor in the last resort prevent 
the man who is on the defensive against the 
truth from erecting other barriers. For 
there are people for whom, like the woman 
of Samaria, religious difficulties and dis- 
cussions are a refuge from a moral challenge. 
In a letter to one of his preachers, John 


THE PREACHER’S TASK 37 


Wesley quotes a bit of advice his father gave 
him when he was young: “ You think to 
carry everything by dint of argument. But 
you will find, by and by, how very little is 
ever done in the world by clear reason.”’ 
And Wesley adds: ‘ Very true indeed.” 
Positive truth alone, shining by its own light, . 
quickening the perceptions, enlightening the - 
eyes, is the argument which has the power : 
in the long run. There is a very definite . 
danger that the preacher who pays too much 
attention to the person with religious diffi- 
culties and gives himself to the building up 
of logical bases for truth, may be keeping 
people from resting on the true foundation, 
which is an experience and not a syllogism. 
A word must be said of sermons of another 
negative type—sermons which are denuncia- 
tory or pugnacious. The psychologist has 
a startling commentary on stridency in the 
pulpit ; he puts it down to a conflict in the 
preacher himself, or, at least, to a subtle 
want of confidence in the truth. Be that as 
it may, sarcasm, or irony, or vehement con- 
demnation, is a mistake. A text which gives 
a chance for invective is very attractive, 


38 IN QUEST OF REALITY 


especially when we are young. It may be 
questioned whether it ever does any real 
good. People generally apply it with unction 
to their neighbours and applaud _ the 
preacher’s courage. Those who in sincerity 
take the message to themselves will prob- 
ably not deserve it; or, if they do, may only 
be embittered or discouraged. To quote 
Wesley again: “I have often repented of 
judging too severely but very seldom of being 
too merciful.” It is true that Jesus could 
denounce, but He did it, as we know when 
we get behind the scenes, with a breaking 
heart. No one would plead for soft words 
- and honeyed accents. The truth will hurt ; 
‘it will probably wound. There is no preach- 
‘ing worth doing to-day which will not have 
. for its first effect a quickening of conscience 
- among religious people, bringing them face 
- to face with a moral issue in things which 
- many have been accustomed to look upon as 
. neutral ground. But denunciation will never 
-do it. It is the same with the wrong views 
which people hold: you can only meet and 
overcome them by the truth —the truth 
which is already rooted in the false view and 


THE PREACHER’S TASK 39 


which is really giving to the latter its power. 
Denounce the grotesque ideas associated with 
Christian Science as we may, the question a 

~man who is drawn that way will ask us, is 
what we have to put in its place. Many of 
our most flagrant errors are only the refuge 
for a mind that has been deprived of the 
fulness of the truth. 

_.In the biography of Dr. John Clifford, 
lately published, there is a quotation from 
his diary describing some sermons to which 
he had listened. In particular he tells of 
hearing ‘“‘a sermon on Acts iv. 12: Salva- 
tion through Jesus and salvation only 
through Jesus. The sermon was an attempt 
to expose the hollowness and uselessness of 
expedients for salvation, eg. (1) Govern- 
mental changes; (2) improvement in ex- 
ternal circumstances of men; (3) educa- 
tion; (4) metaphysical culture; (5) re- 
finement. There was much of everything 
except Christ. All these other forces were 
treated as though they could do no good to 
any one. It was a most unsatisfactory 
sermon, calculated to alienate all young and 
reflective minds. It lacked balance; worst 


40 IN QUEST OF REALITY 


of all, it lacked Christ. And yet I do not 
doubt the preacher felt that he was preach- 
ing the gospel. ... The more I think of 
last night’s sermon the more I see the urgent 
need for reform in preaching.”’ Much could 
be said of such a line of argument as that 
suggested above, from the point of view of 
its truth. For who in these days would deny 
the influence of the Spirit in any one of these 
things which were condemned? Yet that is 
not what I am concerned with at the moment. 
The point I would make is, that to take up 
a large part of a sermon with a discussion 
of what the gospel is not is an entirely barren 
method, depressing and unenlightening. If 
the treatment of a subject seems to demand 
that misrepresentations or false ideas be first 
cleared out of the way, this should be done 
as briefly as possible and merely to make 
a pathway for the positive message. The 
presentation of Jesus and His message can 
safely be trusted to dethrone the false idols. 


“For oh! the Master is so fair, 
His smile so sweet to banished men, 
That they who meet Him unaware 
Can never turn to earth again.” 


THE PREACHER’S TASK 41 


The cardinal fact about the gospel is that ° 
it is a gift. God comes to men seeking them. : 
He has taken the initiative. Religion is not ° 
primarily a problem to be solved: it is a’ 
gift to be received. There is a way of preaching * 
which leaves the impression that the truth is 
something so mysterious that only those who 
are willing to face an intellectual struggle, 
not far short of the heroic, can fathom the 
secret; whereas it is something that will 
unfailingly meet men’s needs in such a way 
as to convince them of its authority, if only 
they will be sincere with it. We carry to 
men in the Name of the Lord a message that 
makes them conscious of infinite Divine 
resources. That is what makes it a gospel. 
The demand God makes springs out of the 
gift God offers. His love creates the sense 
of duty, and provides the power that makes 
duty the joyful exercise of our souls in 
freedom. That message that we must work 
out our own salvation can be preached only 
in the light of the primal fact that God is 
working in us. God is a Redeemer Who is 
out to find us, if only we will allow ourselves 
to be found; in Him also is the grace to 


42 IN QUEST OF REALITY 


conquer the last citadel of our unwillingness ; 
so that all we want to meet the deepest need 
of our intractable wills and spiritually de- 
pleted natures, isin Him. The all-sufficiency 
of God to find men wherever they are and 
bring them to Himself, is the very core of 
the gospel. 


3. This brings me to say that real preach- 
‘ing must be thorough; it must go to the 
‘ root of the situation and must meet it with 
~ the whole counsel of God. We can only help 

people by the full message of God in Christ. 
‘ The temptation that besets us is to dwell on 
' some aspects of the truth to the exclusion of 
. Others, till the truth becomes distorted. We 
. may dwell, for instance, on the Fatherhood 
‘of God in such a way that God becomes 
* only a genial kind of parent who will tolerate 
‘ almost anything in his child, and whose very 
forgiveness is only what Stevenson describes 
in the old laird of Ballantrae as ‘‘ the tears 
of senility.” Perhaps there is no word that 
needs more emphasis in our day than the 
exhortation: “If ye call on God as Father, 
pass the time of your sojourning here in 


THE PREACHER’S TASK 43 


fear.”’ On the other hand, it is possible to 
state the necessity for repentance in such a 
way as to make people think that God is 
merely concerned with wounded feelings. 
Men are not going to be won into the Kingdom 
of God by abstracting this or that truth from 
the message. The gospel can do very little 
for people who will not allow it to do every- 
thing. People cannot be saved to-day from 
the things from which many of them are 
crying to be delivered, except by a full 
entrance into the real secret of Christianity. 
Only the fulness of the Christian message can 
really help people. Let me give an illustra- 
tion or two of what I mean. We take it for 
granted that the gospel ought to deliver men 
from fear; and so we preach it. “ Be not 
afraid,’ we say to people who are shrinking 
from some threatening terror in a world of 
risks. We preach to them the care and love 
of God. But to tell them that and nothing 
more will do little for them except build a 
kind of shelter behind which they tremble 
still and which the first big trouble will blow 
down. Faith in God thus preached is a very 
leaky ship in which to put to sea on a very 


» 


44, IN QUEST OF REALITY 


dangerous ocean. And there are a great 
many people to whom faith is just that—an 
unreality by which they preserve with diffi- 
culty an unstable equilibrium they call peace. 
We have to go further. What is this love 
of God, and what is God in His love seeking 
todoforus? His is obviously not a love that 
merely seeks to keep us safe and comfortable, 
but a love that is out for our character as His 
children. And there is no peace till we see 
that and consent to it; which means, of 
course, a new valuation of life, and a new 
conception of the love of God—in other 
words, the acceptance of the outlook of 
Jesus both on God’s love and on life’s ideal. 
Outside of that, to speak of God’s care of 
us is mere sentiment which only keeps the 
trouble quiet, but does nothing to cast it 
out. 

Or take the message of forgiveness. To - 
many people it is an unreality because they 
are still conscious of the external results of 
sin, and it is from these that they are 
really seeking to be delivered. Or, in other 
cases, it is a mere shelter from punishment 
in the future life which they are seeking. 


THE PREACHER’S TASK A5 


But there is no power in forgiveness till it’ 
means restoration to the fellowship of God 
through a new attitude that is ready to face: 
the sin with all its consequences, and is at. 
peace because there is nothing more to hide.. 
This means, however, seeing the good of life 
in fellowship with God and in the way of 
righteousness, whatever it may cost; it 
means insight into the real meaning of sin 
as estrangement from Him. No cheap and 
easy gospel, no genial proclamation of pardon, 
will produce the peace which is the peace 
that passeth understanding, and not a sham 
or a hypocrisy. 

Christianity is going to mean nothing as 
power in the world except as it saves men 
into the mind and attitude of Jesus through 
and through, and this involves a change which 
nothing but the full message of God's grace 
can produce and nothing but the fulness of 
His love can sustain. ( Christianity cannot 
survive at all in a world like this, upon an 
emasculated gospel or a message which is 
reduced to a few genial observations about 
the love of God.) The question for us is 
whether we are going to trim our preaching 


46 IN QUEST OF REALITY 


to enable men and women to carry on with a 
certain amount of cheerfulness and courage 
and hope, calling them to “the task of 
happiness,’ or some such thing ; or whether 
we are going to ask them to face life in right 
relations with God the Father revealed in 
Christ crucified. With all due respect and 
admiration for these writers, we cannot get a 
gospel for the redemption of the world out of 
Stevenson’s philosophy or Kipling’s challenge 
to be a man. The message of God to men 
cannot be prostituted into ‘‘a handy book 
for the successful merchant,” nor into the 
inspiration to help a nation to win a war, nor 
into a panacea for life’s ills, nor into a means 
for supplying a world with comfortable 
amenities, nor indeed into any kind of re- 
inforcement to the spirit of man on the high 
road of his own ambition or his own self- 
chosen way of life. The Christian life is 
" eternal life in the midst of time, by the 
strength and under the eyes of God.” 


It is our difficult task to call people out 
- to do business in great waters. Only as 
. they are willing to follow, can we help them 


THE PREACHER’S TASK At 


to see “the works of the Lord and His 
wonders in the deep.” It is no easy am- 
bassadorship. In the Covenanting times, 
you remember, a certain travelling merchant 
reported on preachers he had heard. Each 
had his own peculiar quality. ‘‘ One showed 
me the majesty of God, another the loveli- 
ness of Christ, and another showed me all 
my heart.’’ You will need to combine all 
three before you will get a gospel for this 
age or any age. This age of ours, however, 
has this peculiar advantage as a field of 
operations, that it is heartsick of unrealities 
and is not nearly so afraid of being hurt. 
For many of the old shelters have been 
blasted down, and countless people are out 
in the open, seeking, not for a covert from 
the stormy blast, but for a heart of peace in 
the midst of strife—a life which is storm- 
beaten and yet secure. Nevertheless, you. 
will be tempted to the easy way of popularity . 
and quick returns which has made ship- - 
wreck of many a promising ministry. You ° 
will be tempted (as the Roman Church in her 
mission was tempted and fell) to a way of 
preaching which aims at making people 


48 IN QUEST OF REALITY 


‘ comfortable in their souls rather than right 


¢ 


with God, at taming the beast in man instead 


- of transforming him, at helping people to 


‘walk by safe rules of good conduct instead © 
-of in the adventurous freedom of the Spirit. . 


To take the other way may mean for the 
time being smaller congregations, and a 
Church which is only a spiritual remnant, 
though signs are not even now wanting 
that there is a revival waiting the true 
message. But whatever it means, our 
aim in the ministry of preaching is nothing 
less than this, “‘ that they being rooted and 
grounded in love may be able to comprehend 
with all saints what is the height and 
breadth and length and depth, and to know 
the love of Christ which passeth knowledge, 
that they may be filled with all the fulness 
of God.”’ 


LECTURE II 
THE PREACHER’S AUDIENCE 


IT is a mere commonplace to say that if we 
are to preach to men and women we must 
know them. If we are to be “ fishers of 
men,’ which was Christ’s own phrase for 
His apostles, we must know the nature and 
habits of the fish. The primary need of an 
effective sermon is that people must listen 
to it. We must get their attention. And 
we can only get their attention by appealing 
to their interests. In plain words, a sermon 
must be interesting. It is useless to excuse. 
ourselves for being dull by saying that people 
are not interested in a religious subject. 
Even if that were true, which it is not, we 
have got to make them interested. That is 
what preaching is for. I appreciate fully the 
suggestion that a congregation can do very 
much to help us in advance by a willing 
attention—by a strenuous effort to overcome 
4 


50 IN QUEST OF REALITY 


those persistent voices from the outer world 
that prevent the quiet recollection and con- 
centration upon God. ‘“ Happy is the man,” 
-says George Eliot, ‘““ who has an audience 
that demands his best.’’ There are con- 
gregations all over the country which, if only 
they would bring with them a spirit of ex- 
pectant attention, could change the whole 
atmosphere of their churches; they would 
turn many a dispirited messenger of Christ 
into a flaming prophet. All that is true. 
But that does not absolve us from the task 
of securing their interest. We have the 
people there without going out to seek them. 
They would not be there in days like these 
if there were not at least the suggestion of 
a hunger hid away somewhere behind the 
abstracted look. But we have no right to 
presume upon their attention. If we were 
going to the streets with our message, we 
should not prima facie look for attention. 
We should set about creating it or should 
expect to lose the audience. And we have 
no right to count on people listening to a 
sermon just because we have prepared it, or 
because we happen to be interested in it; 


THE PREACHER’S AUDIENCE 51 


nor dare we presume upon the zeal or good- 
nature of a congregation so far as to give 
them ill-digested abstractions or imagine 
they will receive a message in any form in 
which we happen to offer it. In point of 
fact they will not, and by a psychological 
law they cannot. If they do not set about 
finding an interest, we must create it for 
them. Many sermons fail just here, because 
the people are not interested in the subject, 
and the reason why they are not interested 
in the subject is often, if the truth were told, 
because the preacher is not interested in 
them. A very true description of the differ-_ 
ence between an effective minister and an 
ineffective one is that the former is more 
interested in people than in ideas, while the 
latter is more interested in ideas than in 
people. 

We have got to find interests, then, in the 
minds of the people before us. We have got 
to find them also in real things—things that 
matter. And the interest must be a religious 
interest. It is no use knocking at doors to 
get a hearing for God, where He cannot well 
enter in. We can get people interested ‘on 


52 IN QUEST OF REALITY 


the wrong side of their nature by stirring 
up feelings and enthusiasms it is useless to 
awaken. We must be on the alert to find a 
spot where-a man’s nature is “alive unto 
God.”” It may be some sore point, or some 
spiritually sensitive point, or, on the other 
hand, some point of aspiration where their 
nature is just waiting to break into a flame 
of faith. 

For let us remember the Gospel is good 
news to be received with welcome, and it is 
good news because it speaks to a condition 
of human need. ‘“‘ As living water to a thirsty 
soul ’’—that is the kind of metaphor which 
describes it. It is not something to be 
argued about or received with blind credulity ; 
it is truth which meets some ultimate need 
of the human soul and proclaims its authority 
in its power to satisfy it. We cannot, there- 
fore, preach to men’s condition unless we can 
diagnose their need and so proclaim our 
gospel as both to unveil it and supply it. 

For that purpose we must know men and 
women. How we are to win that knowledge 
is part of the making of a preacher, with 
which I will deal later. Some of us have had 


THE PREACHER’S AUDIENCE 53 


experience of life from other points of view 
than that of college training. That is in- 
valuable. We should take every opportunity 
we can of learning about business, about 
other professions than our own, of the way 
in which people live, how they look at things, 
what they are thinking, where the yoke of 
life galls the raw flesh. A preacher will make 
little of it who has not taken the trouble 
to know, as intimately as he can, the 
peculiar problems and difficulties which his 
people meet with in their daily callings. He 
will put his foot in it very badly and make 
many a false appeal. Half his time he will be 
talking in the air. Nothing can be worse than 
to attempt to deal with a situation we do 
not know. Confidence will be shattered at 
a blow, and an air of unreality created which 
will perpetuate the fatal habit of looking at 
a sermon from a detached point of view as if 
it were spoken in a vacuum, and were not 
intended to be taken seriously. There is the 
other danger, of course, which is to confine 
ourselves to tame abstractions which may 
sound very sublime, but never reach any 
tender or sensitive spot, or convince a hearer 


54 IN QUEST OF REALITY 


that Christianity is for him what William 
James called a “ live option.’”’ Nothing can 
be more futile than to watch a preacher 
mounting his favourite hobby-horse, be it 
theological or evangelistic, and setting off on 
a course of half an hour or so. The con- 
gregation knows he will get going all right 
and finish up possibly in grand style, so it 
goes to sleep, either literally or intellectually, 
till it is over, for it has no stakes on that horse, 
and has watched its career so often that it 
has lost interest in its paces. We must get 
_to know people, their difficulties, their be- 
setting sins, and what it is that makes their 
temptations, else we shall be guilty of apply- 
_ing remedies that simply do not meet the 
situation because we do not know its real 
poignancy or have failed to realize its 
glamour. We tilt at wealth and fashion, for 
instance, but ‘‘ wealth and fashion,” says 
O. W. Holmes, ‘‘ are two very solemn 
realities, which the frivolous class. of 
moralists have talked a great deal of silly 
stuff about. We have got to find the 
breadth and depth of that significance which 
gives to fashion and fortune their tremendous 


THE PREACHER’S AUDIENCK 55 


power.” We do not beat the devil by under- 
rating his wares. We have to measure the 
need, the longing, which sends people to 
certain illegitimate and paltry satisfactions, 
and to supply it from our message in a 
way that shall supplant the intruders. That 
is both sound psychology and common 
sense. 

There is another reason why we need to, 
know people. We want them to come to 
God, but people do not come to God in 
general. They come through the sharp 
challenge, with the call of God in it, that iS 
meeting them in daily life, or through some 
decision in practical things which throws 
open the choice between the darkness and the 
light. It is not a bit of use talking to people 
of a God who is in the skies, or a God who is 
in a book, or even a God who is in their own 
hearts. That may be sheer unreality, though 
it is true, of course, that God is in their own 
hearts. He is there in their experience of 
life and its inward reactions, or He is no- 
where for them. We simply cannot interest 
people in God in other than an academic 
way, unless we can show them how to find 


56 IN QUEST OF REALITY 


Him just where they are, within the frontiers 
of their own world as they live in it day by 
day. We must take it for granted that we 
are speaking to people who have God in 
their lives, at the moment, in some recog- 
nizable element of experience. We can be 
sure of this, there is a vital point where 
God is meeting every man at the moment, 
in something which he perhaps has not 
recognized for the Divine, and we have 
got to lay hold of that, somehow, and 
illumine it: 

“Till God breaks through it and makes it store 

To the heart that was starving in darkness before.”’ 
To make God a living reality is our business, 
and we can only achieve it in the measure 
in which we are able to reveal His Spirit, 
even now, pulsing through the stuff of life. 
Modern psychology has laid open an enormous 
field in this respect, though it, like every 
newborn science in the omniscience of its 
youth, is in some quarters attempting to 
step beyond its sphere and to make affirma- 
tions about religion which it has no business 
to make, because that is not its province. 
We shall have to meet the suggestion that 


THE PREACHER’S AUDIENCE 57 


all man’s experience is explained by the un- 
conscious without reference to God, which is 
-no more the case than that a spring in the hill- 
side is explicable without the rain that comes 
from the heavens. The psychologist has no 
more right as psychologist to declare that 
his science explains the origin of experience, 
than the evolutionist had in Darwin’s day 
the right to declare that his theories explained 
the primal origin of the world. The true 
function of psychology is really one of helping 
people to make the right adjustment to life 
so that reality can make its own appeal to 
them. Its business is to help men into 
an attitude of sincerity in relation to the 
world through which God reveals Himself. 
There is no doubt of a man’s response to the 
Christian message which is presented to him if 
only he will be sincere with it. That was the 
reason why the one thing that Jesus asked of 
people was that they should be sincere—open 
to the light from whatever quarter it might 
come, and whatever demands it might bring ; 
that response of sincerity with the truth 
being the one response which it is within the 
power of every man to make. 


58 IN QUEST OF REALITY 


I 


Nothing, however, can keep us right and 
preserve our perspective, or give us such 
intimate knowledge of men, revealing us to 
them, and them to themselves, as the study 
of Jesus in His world.of men. Men are, 
what they are in the presence of Jesus; and 
the Gospels in their sincerity have preserved 
in the presence of Jesus His revelation of the 
thoughts and intents of the heart. In the 
Gospels with Him we are in a real world 
where human nature stands out in a light 
which makes that world a mirror of humanity 
for all time. We shall see there the things 
that shaped His message and perpetuated it. 
In a real sense, every word He spoke, and 
everything He did, was related to some need 
or trouble or defect in the lives of men around 
Him, calling forth the revelation of the heart 
of God which could deal with it. And the 
gospel stories were primarily recorded and 
kept alive because of the existence of these 
same needs and defects in the world of the 
early Church which wrote these stories down. 

What, then, are the elements which He 


THE PREACHER’S AUDIENCE 59 


found in human life and which are still, 
to-day, the objective of our message and the 
living points of our appeal ? 

athirsteof: all. perhaps, there is fear; and, 
allied to it, the fungus growth of care ; both - 
of which have their being in a world which 
is empty of the sunlight of a clear vision 
of God. How much these were in Christ’s 
mind as an objective of His message, you can 
trace in the number of times He dealt with 
them. Again and again He attacked both 
fear and care. Some of the most character- 
istic words of His gospel are ‘‘ Fear not,” 
“Do not worry.’’ As He looked into men’s 
hearts, He saw there a haunted world. Men 
were afraid of all kinds of things—the future 
and the past, the trouble that might come 
to-morrow, and the evil fruits of yesterday. 
They were afraid of one another, afraid of 
themselves. “If there were only one man 
in the world,’ said Goethe, ‘“‘ he would be 
a terror to himself.” They were afraid of 
the Fates, even of God Himself as they knew 
Him. They were afraid of those who were 
their masters, of those also who were their 
slaves. They were afraid of changes, of 


60 IN QUEST OF REALITY 


civil disturbance, of revolutions in religion, 
of any kind of change in the old order of 
things. They were afraid of death and the 
afterward, and of all the nameless and in- 
explicable and unpreventable suffering of 
life. To Jesus, fear and care had the same 
root. It was a wrong relation to God and 
therefore to life: the evil could only be put 
right by getting down to its roots and dealing 
with it there. It was sheer atheism, how- 
ever pure or worthy might be the motive 
behind it; a baptized unbelief, if you like, 
sanctified by a lovingly anxious mind and a 
high seriousness of purpose, but still unbelief. 

And you find the same fear haunting the 
world of to-day. How deeply the poison of 
it is infecting our social life in every direction 
we all know, breeding suspicion in all sorts of 
ways, creating strife between man and man, 
class and class, nation and nation. No social 
solution for the ills of our common life is 
going to be of any avail that does not eradi- 
cate fear, by removing some of its prevent- 
able and external causes. You find this fear 
also in the individual conscience which still 
“doth make cowards of us all.’’ You find 


THE PREACHER’S AUDIENCE 61 


it in relation to God and the religious out- 
look. What a bankruptcy of any true vision 
of God is revealed by our familiar supersti- 
tions; the pathetic dependence, for instance, 
on mascots, which though apparently treated 
as a joke, really mask for many people— 
some of them professedly Christian—a super- 
stitious outlook upon life. What a chance 
for a message about Providence and God’s 
ways with men and a truly religious attitude 
to life, this provides for a preacher! It may 
seem a small thing that a man may dislike 
sitting down one of thirteen at table, but you 
have got a joint in his armour there, through 
which you can reach his mind with a new 
view of the universe and a new vision of God, 
and release him from a whole battalion of 
fears, of which he may have been uncon- 
scious, into a new freedom. That is only 
one illustration. But in various ways fear 
is operating, demanding security of material 
kinds—the security of money or of armaments, 
or of external authorities and ecclesiastically 
guaranteed truth—in all of which, of course, 
there is no real security but only, as Christ 
often pointed out, another breeding-ground 


62 IN QUEST OF REALITY 


for further fear. When we preach our gospel, 
we have to take account of fear. 

Another element in man’s nature is pride, 
which also takes many forms and makes the 
heart very sensitive at certain points. There 
is the pride that shows itself in social 
ostracism of others who are down, or of 
those who are supposed to be _ inferior. 
There is the pride that manifests itself in 
the easily offended spirit, and the subtle 
pride which demands a religion of good 
works. Pride sometimes issues also in a 
remorse that looks very Christian and may 
be really very un-Christian: the root of it 
is the refusal to accept oneself and the 
situation one has created, and the low esti- 
mate of our character which moral failure 
has brought, and demands instead a rein- 
statement to self-respect on the terms of 
some kind of self-justification and not of the 
forgiving light of truth and love. A great 
deal of pride, of course, is due to fear—the 
secret fear that we are not as good as we 
ought to be, or are not so sure of ourselves 
as we think we are, and therefore we com- 
pensate for this sense of inferiority by 


THE PREACHER’S AUDIENCE 63 


censoriousness or depreciation of others, or 
even by determined good works. It is easy 
to see what an opening for the gospel one 
can find at the sensitive point of pride, as it 
constantly offers itself to our attack. 

Class distinctions and social barriers, these » 
also Christ saw to be wrong with His world. 
Men had a wrong outlook to one another as 
individuals, as classes, as nations. The air 
was thick with prejudices. The great 
cleavage between the Jew and the Gentile 
illustrates some of them. A false patriotism 
created one barrier. The Jew had not 
learned the lesson taught by the great 
prophets and by that unknown genius who 
wrote the story of Jonah, that the place of - 
privilege is a place of responsibility, and 
that the only aristocracy among nations and 
men is the quality of the service they are 
fitted to give to the world. There were 
barriers too between the classes, between 
master and slave, between the imperialist 
race and the subject people, between the 
religiously respectable and the outcast. You 
can see how Christ is always trying to break 
them down in parable after parable—the 


64 IN QUEST OF REALITY 


Good Samaritan, the Pharisee and the 
Publican; the greatest story in all the 
world, the story of the Prodigal and the 
Elder Brother. These barriers were always 
creating sore spots which He attacked in His 
message, and found them often ready for 
the healing surgery of truth. 

There is no need to point out that these 
barriers exist to-day, standing in the way 
of the gospel and blinding spiritual per- 
ception. Yet such is the reaction of evil 
that they provide a point at which we can 
bring men face to face with God. How 
easily men find their way into the secret of 
Jesus when these barriers are down, you can 
see in the case of the centurion. His open- 
ness to the glory of Jesus is explained just 
by the fact that, in his case, all the barriers 
were down. He had somehow overcome 
them all—the race barrier, the ecclesiastical 
barrier, the barrier of superiority which 
attaches to people of a dominant race, the 
barrier between officer and_servant—they 
were all down. There was about the man a 
fine catholicity, and this openness to what- 
ever was good in humanity laid him open 


THE PREACHER’S AUDIENCE 65 


at once to the wonder of Jesus Christ. We 
cannot enough appreciate how much these 
barriers are hiding God. As we shall dis- 
cover, the thing that is keeping many people 
out of the Kingdom of God is just something 
wrong somewhere in their relations with 
another ; it may be in the home, it may be 
in business, it may be as part of a race or 
national prejudice which they share with 
their fellows. In many a life it is just some 
grudge, some wrong attitude, some bitter 
memory, some twisted relationship, that is 
holding up a great enlightening freedom. 
Keep hold of this truth—the great door into 
the Kingdom of God swings on some pivot in 
the personal life of the man or woman with 
whom you are dealing. People do not sur- 
render to Christ in general or in the abstract. 
The decisive step is never taken in the air, or 
at least does not become effective until it 
is embodied in some concrete thing. The 


illuminating vision comes in the aspect of , 


some living situation which it reveals. Some- 

times we recognize the coming of the light 

only by the shadow which it throws. And 

one of the commonest of the barriers that 
5 


+i. 


ema 


66 IN QUEST OF REALITY 


hold the door in the lives of people is just 
the barrier between man and man. It is 
part of our great business to be reconcilers 
in ever so many ways, and among other 
reconcilements, to reconcile men to God by 
reconciling them to one another. 

Yet another kind of trouble which Christ 
discerned and which gave the shape to much 
of His message was false values. The root 
of a good many troubles and sins is there. 
Take the incident of the man who came with 
his plea for justice in the division of some 
property. ‘‘ Take heed,” said Christ, “ and 
beware of covetousness. For a man’s life 
consisteth not in the abundance of the 
things which he possesseth.” The man’s 
values were wrong. The real trouble was 
the rift between him and his brother, but 
what was troubling him was that he was not 
getting enough money. He was looking at 
the latter as the chief thing in life, instead 
of brotherliness, as it was to Jesus, and this 
false valuation was introducing all kinds of 
jealousy and strife. How many quarrels 
would be settled out of hand if money took 
its rightful place—quarrels, too, which can 


THE PREACHER’S AUDIENCE 67 


eventually be settled in no other way! The 
same is, of course, true of a dozen other things. 
Even in many of our churches the average 
man is all wrong in his standards—his 
standards of greatness, of success in life, of 
the real good and satisfaction of it. The 
struggle of life grows hard and bitter because 
our values are false in various directions. 
Get right down to the social problem, to the 
competition which turns life into a jungle for 
both the fit and the unfit, and it is false 
values that create the fever in the blood. 
One of the keenest and most radical of our 
Labour leaders was discussing with a group 
of ministers what kind of message the Church 
ought to be delivering to-day, and where lay 
the real sore spot ; and he turned to them and 
said something like this: ‘‘ Your business, 
gentlemen, is not with the economics or other 
externals of the problem. Your business is 
to change the standards of success.” We 
need only think for a moment to realize how 
deep that suggestion cuts. The real thing 
that makes life so miserably poor for some 
and so miserably prosperous for others, is in 
the standards of success which men have set 


68 IN QUEST OF REALITY 


up for themselves; or had forced upon them, 
as some have, by that bitter social struggle. 
If we can bring men to see that money is only 
valuable as a means of service, that true 
success consists in the kind of manhood we 
are building up, that real joy is found along 
the pathway of unselfishness, that persons 
are worth more than property, we shall 
have created the atmosphere in which alone 
any true reconstruction of society becomes 
possible. To change men’s values means to 
change everything for them—their interests, 
their desires, their ambitions ; it is in very 
truth the gift of a new heart. 

And, last of all, the trouble of life is rooted 
in veligious unreality. There were many 
excellent people among the religious folk of 
Palestine, as we know—many excellent people 
among the Pharisees. We can never forget 
that the temper of the race from which they 
sprang was that which sharpened the swords of 
the early Maccabees. But the trouble was that 
religion had become hardened into formula 
and ritual. Men who have to fight for a 
religious principle embodied in some creed, 
or ritual, or method of worship, nearly 


THE PREACHER’S AUDIENCE 69 


always tend to stereotype their religion in 
that external thing, forgetting the principle 
and making the formula everything, losing 
the living spirit and sanctifying the ritual 
act or institution. Ritual becomes every- 
thing —the heart, nothing; the temple, 
everything—the God who is everywhere, 
forgotten ; the altar, supreme—the love and 
_ the surrendered will, nothing ; virtue or sin 
in the act, everything—the intention or the 
living will behind the act, nothing. Who 
shall say that Pharisaism is dead? As a 
matter of fact, it is the second stage of a 
religious experience that has lost touch with 
its original impulse. Part of our great 
business to-day is to bring men face to face 
with the living spirit. What is religious 


reality ? It is that attitude to God as per- - 


sonal holy love which finds expression through 
everything. It finds and seeks expression 
in ritual postures and praises, only that it 
may the more definitely and clearly keep 
that attitude in the daily work and relation- 
ships of life. Worship is only real when 
there is no contradiction in any of its acts 
or ritual, with our real relationship to God. 


{ 
} 


70 IN QUEST OF REALITY 


Love to God is only real when it finds ex- 
pression in love to men, its only medium. 
It is of no use a man calling Christ ‘“ Lord” 
who does not do the thing which He com- 
mands. It is mere mockery to recite a 
creed which is not the utterance of a joyful 
and convincing experience. To bring reality 
back into religion by helping men to find | 
afresh, and have ever recreated within them,, 
the living experience; to tear off masks \ 
which men put on to hide from the reality of | 
their own condition, or the reality of a love 
and forgiveness which they can get on no 
other terms than by a Father’s mercy—that 
is part of our task in preaching. But here, 
again, we can find a foothold for our message 
in extraordinary ways. ‘There are people in 
all our churches to whom your message along 
this line will be hard and distasteful in the 
extreme. But there are others who are long- 
ing for a right release from some burden of 
religious observances which is galling them, 
but which they cannot give up because they 
are held to these observances by holy associa- 
tions, or because they feel they ought to find 
in them the joy and peace which they are 


THE PREACHER’S AUDIENCE 71 


seeking there. You will bring them release if 
you will first help them frankly to face the 
fact that they find nothing in these obser- 
vances and then open up for them that new 
contact with the Father by which the old 
wells once more are bubbling with living 
water. What a field for preaching on prayer, 
on worship, on the Sacrament of the Lord’s 
Supper; reinterpreted in the light of our 
true relation to God the Father, and restored 
to a living medium of His intercourse with 
His children, and of their intimate brother- 
hood with one another ! 


I] 


So far I have been speaking of what might 
be termed the negative elements in human 
nature—the things that make our problem, 
and create what we call sin. For all acts 
of sin more or less proceed from these deep 
roots. This brings me to say that it is no 
use preaching against sin in general. There 
is no such thing, in the abstract ; any more 
than there is any such thing as goodness 
in the abstract. The fact that people are 
not worrying about their sins, to use a phrase 


72 IN QUEST OF REALITY 


that became threadbare long ago, is really 
very largely due to the fact that our con- 
ceptions of sin have been often just as un- 
real as our conceptions of goodness—a series 
of conventional acts which had little obvious 
relation to our attitude to God as His children. 
Most of the ‘sins of society,” as they are 
called, can only be rightly seen as sins and 
convincingly condemned in the light of great 
principles which would equally condemn 
things that the ordinary man never thinks 
of calling sin. It is along these lines we can 
“convince the world of sin.” But that is 
to anticipate what I propose to deal with 
later on. 

Let me now for a little, touch on the more 
positive elements in the hearts and minds 
of men, which are our allies in bringing men 
~tgGod. Twoillusions, I believe, are shattered 
for many people by the experience of the 
last few years, or will need to be shattered 
by our message. One is the mechanical: 
idea of progress. The notion that there is 
such a thing as a river or stream of progress 
that somehow carries us along if only we will 
just drift and so somehow “get better and 


THE PREACHER’S AUDIENCE 73 


better every day”’ or every century, is gone 
for ever. The other illusion is the belief in a 
magical Christianity. The latter, I know, 
dies hard, and in some quarters it is fighting 
desperately for its life and making a brave 
show of vitality; but, generally speaking, 
sensible men are not now repeating so much 
as formerly the shibboleth that ‘“ Christianity 
has failed,”’ a phrase that really reflects a 
belief in some magical Christianity. The 
shattering of these illusions has, with many, 
only produced despair— despair of any 
progress, or of any power in the Christian 
faith, or of any help in God. But, on the 
other hand, with many there is a growing 
realization that God can help us, but only in 
the measure of the response of our whole 
personality, mind and heart and will, to 
His adventure of seeking, saving love. And 
there are many who are really asking, ‘‘ What 
must we do to be saved ? ’’—or as a young, 
alert man put it to me once, “‘ How do you 
get going in this business?” with the 
assurance that whatever it meant, he was 
in for it with his whole self. 

There is an eagerness, a wistfulness, abroad 


74 IN QUEST OF REALITY 


in the world to-day. There is, for instance, 
the demand for some view of life that shall 
give it meaning and make sense of existence. 
Many people are looking at the world as 
F. W. H. Myers looked at the Sphinx, with 
one question which they long to ask, “ Is the 
universe friendly? ”’ It will be your business — 
to do for them what the princess in Turganev’s 
story did for herself. Her lover had given 
her a ring with a carved Sphinx upon it, 
to typify the strange conflict in her which 
he could not understand. After some years 
it was sent back to him, and he found she had 
scratched across the figure of the Sphinx, the 
form of a Cross. You will have to show men 
how it is in the Cross that the meaning of 
life is found. 

Further, people to-day are in many cases 
not only longing for some purpose in life that 
is big enough to explain it to the satisfaction 
of their minds; it must also be intelligible 
enough and practical enough for them to lay 
hold of it, and so to lay hold of it that it will 
take up every movement of their being and 
express the true selfhood which is the hidden 
urge of every personality, We can hardly 


‘ 


THE PREACHER’S AUDIENCE 75 


over-estimate what a secret curse to many a 
man and woman is the sense of futility in 
life. You will find it in the most unlikely 
quarters. The want of a purpose in life is 
at the root of half the cases that visit the 
psycho-analysts. Many of the younger 
people, whatever they may appear to be on 
the surface, are seeking some task which 
will give them three things, as I heard it 
once put 7) OA definite * purpose, in’ lie; <a 
medium of expressing the unselfish instincts 
of their nature, a part to play in stemming 
the tide of human suffering.” Every one 
may not be able to put it so clearly or even 
be conscious that such divine fires of longing 
are burning within. But it is part of our 
business as preachers to bring to conscious- 
ness and put into definite form, these shadowy 
yearnings after God—for that is what they 
are. We can be sure of this, people are 
waiting for that self-revealing and for the 
message that shall both awaken and fulfil. 
Then there is the sense of moral failure. 
People may not know what sin is, because 
we have so often switched the idea of it on 
to some side-track of lurid vice. But they 


76 IN QUEST OF REALITY 


know what moral failure is. Life with its 
high demands has crippled them, because on 
any high view of it, it is too much for us, if 
we try to live it without God. Sooner or 
later, something crashes through the shelters 
of self-esteem and self-sufficiency, and gives — 
men and women a shuddering look into the 
depths. Sometimes it is just when they go 
out on that road of a great purpose, and find 
they cannot keep their feet on it, that they 
come at last to confess that while much is 
wrong with the world which they long to 
put right, something is also wrong with 
them, and that they must begin with the 
cosmos by beginning at home. “Are not our 
very philanthropies to-day, our passion for 
social service, leading to something like a 
realization of spiritual bankruptcy? Signs 
are not wanting in that direction. When a 
woman who begins by leading the feminist 
movement ends by becoming an enthusiast 
for the second advent, it is a sign at least of 
moral despair which can only be met through 
some vision of God. There are other cases 
still more significant. Even if it be despair 
which is the real significance of the second 


THE PREACHER’S AUDIENCE 77 


coming movement—as it often is—it is a 
significant despair, for it means a recogni- 
tion that without spiritual forces which are 
supernatural, there is no real headway to 
be made against evil enmeshed in a social 
system which it has created. Many of the 
best men in the Labour movement are 
beginning to have at least a fear that there 
is not idealism enough in the movement to 
run it and keep it together: there is even a 
wistfulness in many hearts nearly approach- 
ing an open ear. 3 

There is more than a wistfulness in some 
hearts. There is a real sorrow before which 
all the shelters are down. Something in the 
heart of every man cries out for “‘a great 
companion,’ but the solitude in which we 
really live does not appear till sorrow makes 
it awesomely audible—a silence which can 
be felt. We can be sure of this—there is a 
conspiracy in life to bring men to the need of 
God. That is the very way in which we can 
truly speak of God being in our disciplines 3 
they all come out of a love which, in creating 
the universe of free beings, so made it that 
no man through the abuse of his freedom 


78 IN QUEST OF REALITY 


would put himself for ever beyond the reach 
of that love. But rather, so sinking, he would 
come upon the need of it and find himself 
open to it on some other level. ‘‘ O God, my 
barque is so small, and Thy ocean is so great.” 
That cry of the Breton fisherman lies waiting, 
unspoken, for something which sooner or 
later will set it free in a prayer, and our 
business is to be ready for that moment, 
even though we should be tempted some- 
times to despair of its ever arriving. 

In all sorts of hearts too, there is the hope, 
often disguised, that God will do something. 
It may be disguised as a kind of shallow 
optimism, which we will have to reinterpret ; 
or it may appear as the cult of the second 
coming or some such doctrine, which has a 
great hope in it as well as a despair. Some 
one the other day even described the gamb- 
ling fever as “the prostitution of hope!” 
But*in broken hearts and down in the depths 
there still is hope—the conviction that some- 
how God has control of the situation which 
man has mishandled, and that some day there 
will be a clearing up. | 

Whether men be conscious of God or not, 


THE PREACHER’S AUDIENCE 79 


whether they have any kind of religious 
outlook or not, one thing is sure. God is in 
the life of every man in some kind of spiritual 
experience ; unrecognized it may be, but 
present. “ He has not left Himself without. 
a witness.’’ To interpret God’s dealings with 
us in the things which men feel sacred, is our 
task. The thing we need to do for a great 
many people in our day—serious people, the 
“ godless good,” as the Spectator once called 
them, and people who are not conscious of any 
goodness at all—is to bring them to recognize 
God, who is already at work in their lives. 
That is the hope and wonder of our life in 
the ministry, that we are dealing with men 
and women in whose hearts, all unknown, 
God is at work in ways which we can discover 
and make known to them; so that experience, 
however commonplace it seems, becomes 
lustrous with the Divine; only a thin door 
and the uplifting of a latch is between them 
and the Friendship which is the glory and 
the worth of life. 

One of the needs of to-day is, I repeat, to 
help men to realize that religion is natural ; 
that when a man comes to himself, he prays 


80 IN QUEST OF REALITY 


and turns to His Father; and conversely, 
that when he comes to terms with God, he 
comes to himself. Nothing can be more dis- 
couraging than to picture the religious exptri- 
ence in terms that put it beyond the con- 
ception or the reach of a natural healthy 
man. Goodness is natural, faith is natural, 
fellowship with God is natural, or it is hope- 
less. It is something, to quote Dr. T. R. 
Glover, that can be achieved by a man 
with a wife and five children. But this is 
to trench on what I want to say later. When 
Marco Polo, the great traveller, came home to 
Venice he knocked at the door of his relatives’ 
house—an old man, travel-stained, with an 
old cloak over his shoulders. They did not 
recognize him, and saw nothing more in him 
than a far-travelled stranger who needed 
hospitality, and out of their goodness of 
heart they took him in and set him down 
with them at table. For a while he talked 
and entertained them with his interesting 
discourse. Then he flung off the old dust- 
stained cloak, and beneath it disclosed a 
garb of richest silk brought from the far- 
away lands, whilst from his wallet he drew 


THE PREACHER’S AUDIENCE 81 


gifts of jewels and precious stones, rare 
spices and costly ivory. And-on a sudden 
they found that he was not only their long- 
lost friend, but also their benefactor, enrich- 
ing life beyond their dreams. That is the 
deepest need of men, to find in their ex- 
perience what has been theirs all the time in 
kindly love and gracious inspirations; and 
various kinds of moral challenge begin to 
grow through Christ into a living fellowship 
with a loving Father, in whom they really 
live and move and have their being. To 
find in their own experience the key to this 
redeeming discovery, and put it into the 
hands of men, is part of the task and the 
joy of preaching.- 

It may seem as if, in thus analysing the 
preacher’s audience with such care as scope 
permits, -I have left out the most important 
part of it—those, namely, who are already in 
the Kingdom, and who will come to us for 
instruction and for help. God forbid that I 
should forget them, or that any of us in our 
preaching should forget them—the people who 
walk with God. To do so is a defect into 


which the savage criticism of the Church, 
6 


82 IN QUEST OF REALITY 


which passes with many for prophetic zeal, 
may lead us in our youth. We will learn in 
time that this is one of the real privileges of 
the ministry—to “‘ minister to the saints ”’ in 
deed andintruth. Among them you will find 
an eagerness for fresh truth, a kindling of the 
eye, a rare faculty of appreciation, though it 
be only in one here and there or in a little 
group, which will make you feel when they 
are absent as if you were preaching to an 
empty church. They are always seeking to 
learn. Our constant humiliation will be the 
thought that they are willing and hopeful to 
learn of us, winnowing the grain from the 
chaff of our immaturities. But even with 
some of these the whole connotation of the 
saved life needs reminting, “ for time makes 
ancient good uncouth.”’ Even the saints, who 
like the holy families of Israel, wait for the 
consolation of God and His appearing, need 
to realize that He only breaks in through our 
ever-growing vision of Him in Christ and our 
response to what we see. Even they need to 
realize that conversion means thinking with 
the mind of Christ about everything, that 
what Christ did for us only becomes effective 


THE PREACHER’S AUDIENCE 83 


in the measure in which it enables us to do 
the same for others. There are those to whom 
the Cross is the height of all wonders, con- 
stantly taking their hearts with love and, as 
with Bunyan’s Christian, sending “‘ the waters 
that are in their heads down their cheeks ”’ 
for gratitude. But even these need to discover 
that emotion is not salvation, and that we are 
only redeemed according as our lives become 
redeeming. It is a hard journey we may 
have to take them, but at least our comfort 
is that many are waiting and willing to be led. 


LECTURE III 
SOME TYPES OF PREACHING 


FROM one point of view it is as impossible 
to classify types of preaching as it is im- 
possible, except very generally, to classify 
types of men. Preaching is essentially the 
impression of one personality upon others. 
However varied the subject, a man’s own 
outlook, his point of view, the subtle essence 
of his own spirit, will out. ‘‘ The teacher’s 
heart,” says Emerson, ‘“‘ cannot be hid.” 
Consequently every man will have his own 
note, his own interest, which will appear in 
his preaching. The most we do for a con- 
gregation, even after years of service, is to 
give them a point of view from which to look 
at life and think of God. In point of fact, 
that is what we should strive most of all to 
give them; for if we have not helped them 
to think for themselves and judge for them- 
selves, we have not greatly succeeded. Dean 
4 


SOME TYPES OF PREACHING 85 


Inge, in an address to teachers, said the true 
teacher's business was to make the pupil’ 
independent of him. This is true of the 
preacher as well. A congregation may “sit 
at our feet,’ as the saying has it, but we 
must not forget that their prime business is 
to walk upon their own. Only as we help 
them to that, are we really helping them. 
The best minister is the man who makes his 
people less and less dependent on himself, 
because he has been helping them to make 
their own contacts with the mind of Christ. 
Generally speaking, there are _ three 
dominant interests in the preaching outlook 
which are represented by types of preaching. 
They are the evangelistic, the ethical, and 
the doctrinal. It is worth while to think of 
these in turn, though they cannot well be 
separated from each other. A good evan- 
gelistic sermon, for instance, will be ethical 
in its direction and doctrinal in its founda- 
tions: whilst, as we would all agree, ethics 
without the evangel is machinery without 
power; and without doctrine, out of any 
real relation with a reasonable universe, 
making duty a mere irrational intruder, 


86 IN QUEST OF REALITY 


a Pied Piper with an undeniable call, but 
leading, for all we could know, only to the 
abyss. It was F. W. H. Myers who wrote: 


‘““Whoso hath felt the Spirit of the Highest, 
Cannot confound or doubt Him or deny.” 


But it was Myers also who forsook the 
Christian position because, he said, Christ had 
no cosmic significance. Preaching, whatever 
the particular emphasis of one sermon or 
another, must have in it all three elements. 

Yet throughout the course of the preach- 
ing ministry, there will be a place for each 
of these three kinds of preaching. If there 
is one thing more than another we must 
beware of, it is becoming stereotyped in our 
choice of subjects. We are all prone more 
or less to the peril of the closed mind; or the 
mind so nearly closed that there is only a 
gateway for a certain order of ideas, all 
others being mechanically excluded by the law 
of interests. Many people maintain a rigid 
censorship of unfamiliar ideas, and the 
preacher is not exempt from this defect. For 
all his wide reading he as well as others may 
have a closed mind. 

It is not merely reading, by the way, that 


SOME TYPES OF PREACHING 87 


will save us from this defect, but the habit of 
taking time to think. We may read many 
books and never see anything in them but 
what is cognate to one narrow circle of ideas. 
We are in the zone of danger in this respect 
whenever we find in our reading only illustra- 
tions of what we know already. Many of us 
read too much and think too little; and 
even in what we read, amid the pressing 
work of the ministry it is so easy to get into 
the way of only reading books that lie com- 
fortably to the set of our minds and neglect 
the books that take us out of the depths in 
which we feel safe. There are no rules which 
can be laid down. Each man must find his 
own way. A man with one of the freshest 
theological minds in this country told me 
that he reads hardly anything except his 
Bible, which I imagine is the exact inversion 
of the methods of many people. | 

It isa good thing for the sake of our people, 
as well as for our own self-discipline, to look 
back now and then on the course our preach- 
ing has taken during the previous month or 
two, on the ground we have covered, and on 
the range of subjects we have been dealing 


‘ 


| 


88 IN QUEST OF REALITY 


with, to make sure that unconsciously we 
have not been slipping into a rut. And we 
should make sure of room and space in our 
programmes for sermons which are in their 
emphasis devoted to each of these three kinds 
of preaching, for they correspond to definite 
parts of the preacher’s aim, and to definite 
aspects of God in Christ, and of that relation 
to Himself into which He seeks to bring us. 


I 


Let us think first of all of what is called 
evangelistic preaching. We cannot define it 
so as to please every one. I remember spend- 
ing three Sunday evenings in succession 
trying “‘ to do the work of an evangelist,’’ as 
the Scripture has it, and proposed so to spend 
a fourth evening, when I received a letter 
from a stranger telling me he had been wor- 
shipping in my congregation for three weeks 
and had been edified more or less, but he had 
one favour to ask—Would I kindly preach 
the gospel for once before he left! Evan- 
gelistic preaching is presenting Christ to men 


In such a way as to win them into a personal 


love and loyalty to Him. There are many 


SOME TYPES OF PREACHING 89 


forms of what is called the evangelical experi- 
ence, but there is only one evangelical experi- 
ence, whatever shape it may take or what- 
ever emotional accompaniments may attend 
its birth. That experience is the awakening 
of personal faith in Jesus Christ as Saviour, 
Leader, Master, Friend—use whatever words 
of personal human relationship we may in 
which to define it: they are all mirrors 
of that experience. That personal contact 
with Christ is the burning centre of our 
religion. It is only in this experience that 
our relation to God as personal Father is 
brought to a focus point in reality ; and only 
in this experience can our nature as His 
children be harmonized and the soul be set 
moving on the way of its true independence 
and proper freedom. 

How is this experience to be awakened ? 
Only by such preaching as reveals Christ in 
His life, His spirit, His attitude to men and 
women, His contacts with people of all kinds 
and conditions of need, and centrally in His 
Cross. The heart of the whole message, of 
course, is there. ‘‘ The great offensive of 
love,’ as it has been called, comes to a head 


90 IN QUEST OF REALITY 


there in all its elements of righteousness, 
faith, and compassionate forgiveness. There 
also where love meets the opposition of men, 
their fear, their pride, their false values, their 
lovelessness, their religious unreality — all 
these blinding elements of man’s estrange- 
ment from God, in the Cross come to a head 
in a vividness which can reach the most 
hardened heart to unveil it. But we must 
not forget that while the Cross is, as it were, 
the point where the rays of God’s love in 
Christ are focussed, that love shines through 
the life and spirit of Christ at every point, 
for the Cross is interpretative of the constant 
activity of Jesus toward men all through. 
The Cross must never be preached as a mere 
symbol or as some magic talisman. It is 
Jesus who is there revealed Who must be 
preached ; and the way of love revealed in 
the Cross shown to be characteristic of His 
Spirit all through. At every point in the life 
of Christ you touch the infinite love in action : 
sometimes in the smallest and most trivial 
thing. Hence evangelistic preaching may be 
defined as preaching Jesus so that He stands 
revealed, It is telling the story in such a 


SOME TYPES OF PREACHING 91 


way that people see Him as He is. It is, as 
it were, flinging on the screen of the mind 
and imagination the pictures of Christ which 
are in the gospel story in miniature. We have 
to preach Christ—not preach about Christ, 
and there is here a real distinction. A good 
deal of preaching is preaching about Christ in 
such a way that He becomes merely a kind 
of symbol of God, and not in His own person 
a living reality who meets men and in whom 
men meet God. 

Many a faithful preacher searching his 
habitual message for the possible secret of its 
failure has found it here. He has been 
speaking much about Jesus, but He Himself 
has never been disclosed to make His own 
appeal. It is practically useless, in an age 
which knows little of Jesus from its own 
reading of the Scriptures, to ask men to look 
at Him or think of Him. There are some 
perhaps to whom it is enough to utter the 
Name for a vivid picture of Him, which is 
already in the background of consciousness 
to spring into life and stand before them. 
But there are many others to whom He is 
but a name, without much more than a 


92 IN QUEST OF REALITY 


misty content. It is not our business to 
argue about Him, or defend Him, or even 
state the need for Him, but to preach Him. 
He alone can do His own work in bringing 
men to Himself, and that only in the measure 
in which He is revealed. When we have 
something to show people which is worth 
looking at, we do not need to beg them to 
look at it. We throw a light upon it which 
enables it to become its own attraction. ‘‘ I, 
if I be lifted up,” He said, “ will draw all 
men unto Me’”’; it is a word which, like 
many more of His words, is capable of sug- 
gesting a variety of meanings, of which none 
is without significance ; and this is one, that 
the key to success in evangelistic preaching 
is our ability to set forth Jesus. 

We are the more tempted to this kind of 
preaching nowadays because there is a big 
hiatus in many minds between Christ and 
God, and we soon begin to feel the need of 
removing it. This is best dealt with in a 
sermon which is more particularly doctrinal. 
But let us remember that the bridge is not 
capable of being built till Christ is so revealed 
that men find God in Him ; and they find God 


SOME TYPES OF PREACHING 93 


in Him through what He was and is, in His 
person and life in relation to men. If He is 
truly preached, Jesus will create for people 
His own theological significance, and there 
is no other way of helping people to find God 
in Him, except by the revelation of the 
Divine in His nature as holy forgiving love. 
We must help people to see Jesus. Every- 
thing begins there. And what better material 
can we have than the numberless stories 
which reveal Christ in His contacts with men 
and women—the story of Zaccheus, the 
woman at the well, the healing miracles, the 
woman who was a sinner; in His dealings 
with the disciples in some moment of their 
perplexity or impotence; in parables like 
the Prodigal Son, the Good Samaritan, and 
the like, revealing the love of God in the 
human relations of people who acted like 
Him. We cannot read the Book of Acts, 
especially its early chapters, without realizing 
that the dynamic thing is contact with a 
living Christ—a Christ personally real in His 
moral demand and His individualizing love, 
and immediate in His touch with men and 
women and His guidance of their lives. It is 


94 IN QUEST OF REALITY 


true the phrase—‘‘ the living Christ ’’—is 
suspect to-day, partly for the associations 
which cling to it and partly because people 
are perplexed about it, and we will need to 
be able to deal with people for whom the 
centuries are an impassable barrier. 
“Dim tracts of time divide 
These golden days from me. 


Thy voice comes strange o’er years of change, 
How can I follow Thee?” 


We will need to be prepared to deal with 
that aspect of unreality, and we can help 
many thinking people if we offer them a 
way of seeing the immediacy of their own 
personal spiritual relation to Christ. And 
the only way is by preaching Christ so as 
to awaken the sense of His own spiritual and 
personal reality. The preaching of Christ, 
as He is, can bring people so into vital 
relation with Him that their trouble is 
not how they can conceive the possibility 
of finding touch with Him through the 
centuries, but how along the corridors of 
any universe they can escape from Him. 
The best way, on the whole, is to take it 
for granted that Jesus meets men to-day, 


SOME TYPES OF PREACHING 95 


and go on to reveal Him. No man can get 
face to face with Christ without being brought 
into a world in which space and time are 
transcended. That is His power. You can- 
not finally explain it, or argue men into the 
reality of Jesus. You can only bring it home 
by revealing Him so that He produces His 
own immediate impression of an authorita- 
tive and irresistible love. When Romola was 
fleeing from Florence because things had 
become too much for her, she suddenly 
came face to face with Savonarola, who at 
once bade her return. ‘She started up,” 
says George Eliot, “ with defiant words ready 
to burst from her lips, but they fell back 
without utterance. She had met his calm 
glance, and the impression of it was so new 
to her that her anger sank back as something 
irrelevant. The source of the impression his 
glance produced was the sense it conveyed of 
interest in her and care for her. . . . It was 
simple human fellowship expressing itself as 
a strongly felt bond.’ That is the kind of 
impression which Jesus can produce — the 
impression of interest and care, of human 
fellowship rising into a personal bond—the 


96 IN QUEST OF REALITY 


love which will neither let us off nor let us 
go. And that bond is the saving—the 
evangelical—thing. 

There are problems connected with evan- 
gelism. It has its own: dangers. The 
motives we urge and the appeals we make 
must all be in the line of the message of Jesus. 
That is quite clear. No man can be really 
bound to Christ by motives that are not 
Christian. Is it legitimate to use the appeal 
of fear? ‘In the old way, certainly not. 
Any psychologist will tell you that there is a 
real danger in an appeal which plays upon 
the vague and indefinite fears that are a 
part of the mental inheritance of many 
people. 

On the other hand, there are many states 
‘of anxiety from which it is the work of the 
gospel to deliver men, because they proceed 
from ourselves or rise, it may be, from some 
wrong thought of God. And when they are 
faced in the light of Jesus they will vanish. 
It will be found, perhaps as Bunyan’s pilgrim 
found, that the lions which looked so terrible 
are chained, or, on the other hand, that like 
the Brocken spectre they are only the pro- 


SOME TYPES OF PREACHING 97 


jection of our own selves upon a world on ~ 
which the sunlight has not risen. If people 
have fears relating to a spiritual condition 
or an external circumstance they must be 
helped to face them in the light of truth’ 
not to escape from them by any retreat 
into a vague or sentimental idea of God’s 
goodness or His forgiveness. The gospel 
must never be proclaimed as a shelter from 
self-judgment or from the external con- 
sequences of sin; the real consequences of 
sin in the blinded conscience and in the 
moral nature incapacitated for goodness and 
the fellowship of God, are the things from 
which Christ came to deliver us. But it must 
be made clear that true peace is only found 
in the presence of a love from which we have 
nothing left in us to hide, whose very quality 
is of light in which everything is revealed, and 
which makes us glad to have it so. The 
message needed by those who are afraid of 
external consequences is just that of a love 
which is able to make us face them without 
fear. 

And yet is there nothing which we ought 


legitimately to fear? Will not true evan- 
7 


98 IN QUEST OF REALITY 


gelical preaching strive to awaken the vision 
of Christ and of life in Him, and so to 
awaken it that the thought of missing it, 
and of the sin through which we miss it, will 
send a shudder through the soul? The one 
thing men dare healthily fear is to lose the 
life in Christ and our true relation to God in 
Him, for the real content of that fear is the 
fear of evil and lovelessness. 

The question of evangelism naturally also 
brings up the question of emotion. What 
is the place of emotion in preaching? Some 
one says that we may well suspect an 
emotion in preaching which we do not feel in 
the study in preparing the message. There is 
truth in that. Yet surely there are levels 
of significance which the truth opens up in 
the act of preaching which might not have 
appeared when we prepared the message. — 
Emotion there must be. It is a vital part of 
the response of our whole self to the truth. 
It will come naturally in apprehending the 
truth we are proclaiming. If there be no 
emotion there, something will be wrong 
with our vision of the truth. All response 
to truth is a response in part of some kind of 


SOME TYPES OF PREACHING 99 


feeling. But the truth and the clear vision 
of it in all its meanings must be the dominant 
thing for life. To work up emotion as some 
do because in reality they have a lurking 
scepticism about the power of the truth is 
not only useless; it is degrading, unreal, 
only a superior kind of force. One has seen 
a congregation literally held up and its 
pockets picked by a sentimental appeal for 
charity which was positively harmful; it 
awakened no real thought or concern for 
those who were suffering, such as would 
bring the audience into a real relation to them 
as members one of another and so help to 
change the situation. It merely produced 
the feeling that a donation would discharge 
their liability. Nothing will create so much 
the feeling of unreality as the effort to be 
impressive. If our message is not im- 
pressive we may make any other kind of 
impression we like ; it will not be a spiritual 
impression. The young people of the last 
generation might have been impressed by it, 
though not religiously ; most young people 
to-day will smile. Nothing is so difficult to 
conceal from the latter as stage mechanism 


100 IN QUEST OF REALITY 


in the pulpit. One of our problems in 
personal dealing is the kind of person who 
imagines he» has lost God because he has 
lost feeling. That is one of the relics of a 
wrong emotional emphasis. 

But we must not be afraid of letting 
ourselves go. It is an indispensable part 
of the revelation of truth, for truth only 
comes home to men through preaching in 
its proper emotional atmosphere. To make 
~ people feel the truth is an essential part of 
making them see it. If we come to the point 
where the truth ceases to move us in some 
healthy emotion, we may rightly suspect our 
own apprehension of it, and we will need to 
recover the vision, it may be, on our knees. 7 

Another danger of evangelism is the stereo- 
_ typed appeal, or the habit of looking for and 
working for a stereotyped experience. We 
are all differently made, and while the full 
Christian experience includes various ele- 
ments—the sense of sin, the wonder of forgive- 
ness, the thirst for righteousness, the vision 
of the ideal, the passion to serve, if the 
complete harmony of the soul in relation to — 
God is to be realized—still they come in 


SOME TYPES OF PREACHING 101 


various degrees and in different order. Chris- 
tian saw a Shining Light before he saw the 
Wicket Gate, and was through the Wicket 
Gate a goodish way before he came to the 
Cross ; also he had all sorts of tragic experi- 
ences which were not met with, you re- 
member, by the other members of the family. 
Let us beware of a formula, a stereotyped 
method of looking into the hearts of people, 
and seeking just one thing there. All formulas 
about people, all generalizations that have 
any real point, ought to be suspected. We 
are safe if we stick to the twofold conviction 
that God is seeking all men in Jesus at some 
point in their actual experience, and that, con- 
sciously or unconsciously, they all need Him. 
These two convictions are the very marrow 
of evangelical preaching. 


If 


Let us now think of ethical preaching. 
It is one of the signs of the times that preach- 
ing is becoming more and more ethical. 
There is in this all the more reason for care, 
as well as for thankfulness. True evangelism ' 
is most really and effectively ethical. The 


102 IN QUEST OF REALITY 


danger of the old preaching was that religion 
should divorce ethics; the danger of the new 
kind of preaching is that ethics should divorce 
religion. What is the practical connection 
between them so far as we are concerned with 
it in our preaching? It may be put in this 
way—that all conduct is the vital medium 
of a man’s relation with God the Father as 
His child. In other words, we are not religious 
in order to help us to be good, but we are good 
in order to be truly religious. Goodness is 
incomplete; it has no real meaning, save as it 
is the material, the sacramental medium, of 
a man’s fellowship with God; and with God 
through fellowship with man. Beware, with 
all your power, of the kind of preaching which 
would merely reduce God to the level of an 
ally of man in the maintenance of his own 
self-respect or his own ideal of righteousness. 
The immediate effect of such preaching is to 
produce the conception of a God whom many 
people in this age do not feel they need ; and 
many others, if they would confess it, do not 
regard as having any power. Till conduct, 
as the science of right relations of man with 
man, becomes for us part of our personal 


SOME TYPES OF PREACHING 103 


attitude to God, we have not discovered our 
real power either to advocate the good or to 
condemn the evil. 

Why is anything good or bad? We have - 
got to face that question. Why should people 
not break the Ten Commandments? That is. 
what they are asking to-day, and we have 
little to say to them unless we relate their 
lives to God in Christ Jesus, and to that 
thought of man and society and the world 
which is bound up with the Christian outlook. 
There is a drift from the old moorings which 
is not going to be arrested by mere denuncia- 
tions from the pulpit or by any attempt to 
recapture the thunders of Sinai. We will have 
to deal in the pulpit with some of the big 
vices — drunkenness, immorality, gambling. 
But these cannot be dealt with merely by 
direct intention, or in isolation, or by devoting 
special sermons to them, though that must 
be done occasionally. We will, by the way, | 
not find anything better than a course on 
the Ten Commandments, and we -will discover 
if we try to preach on them that they contain 
a good deal of positive doctrine, and give us 
a good basis for reconstructing morality on 


104 IN QUEST OF REALITY 


the principles of Jesus. But the point I want 
to make is this, that we cannot condemn a 
thing like, for instance, gambling, or any 
other vice, except by reference to principles 
which will condemn our life at many other 
points, and again and again will lay low 
in the dust the respectable conventions of 
many who point the finger at the publican 
and sinner. Only in the light of the principles 
which proceed from the message of God and 
our true relation to Him and to His children, 
can we hope to awaken the sense of sin. 
Another subject that will call for atten- 
tion is the ethics of the home, the relations 
of parents to their children and vice versa. 
-You will be surprised to find how often the 
real hindrance to religious feeling and faith 
is there. A young man’s conflict with his 
father, or a girl’s with her mother, in many 
cases chokes the spring. The sane and 
penetrating spirit of Christian relations 
works out in the ethics of the New Testament. 
‘ Children, obey your parents in the Lord.” 
~ Parents, provoke not your children to anger 
lest they be discouraged.’”’ No moral reform 
needs so much attention, and will mean so 


SOME TYPES OF PREACHING 105 


much for religion and for the world, as the 
Christianizing of home relationships. How 
little parents understand that they mediate 
God the Father to their children on the one 
hand, training them for fellowship with God, 
and on the other that there is a point 
where their authority must rightly give way 
in order that the higher authority of the 
perfect Father may be realized. A true 
apprehension of God’s relation to us would 
cast a flood of light on home-life that would 
change its whole character and prevent 
numberless mistakes. 

Preaching must also, of course, deal with 
the ethics of our social relations. A man is 
not Christian till he is concerned with the 
case of his brother in all sorts and con- 
ditions of need. No one can apprehend the 
teaching of Jesus without seeing that persons 
count for more than property, and that we are 
all more or less responsible for one another. 
And no one can look with Christian eyes on 
the world to-day without seeing how these 
principles are outraged. Whatever view we 
may take of any alternative, our present 
system of competition is seamed with 


106 IN QUEST OF REALITY 


iniquities. Our present social and industrial 
order offers a challenge to the Church as to 
its faith in the Lordship of Jesus. The same 
thing is true of our international relation- 
ships. Part of our task is to create a public 
conscience with regard to war as a method 
of settling disputes, and to develop the idea 
underlying the League of Nations. We.have 
got to change the whole associative value of 
the word patriotism. As it is familiarly used 
it is not Christian, and just there lies half the 
trouble of the world. A large part of our 
message, then, will have to deal with our 
social, industrial, and international life. But 
we will find that much of the trouble in these 
is really rooted in various kinds of wrong 
attitudes of people to one another which 
exist in what are called private relations and 
even in the Church. It is perfectly appalling 
how unchristian people can be toward one 
another—and that even without knowing it— 
because our social conventions are poisoned 
with false valuations of personality. And 
preaching will have to deal with that. But 
one thing ought to be said. The worst way 
of treating these problems is by a continuous 


SOME TYPES OF PREACHING 107 


policy of indignant condemnation : that is, a 
preaching that only raises a blister on the 
skin and never gets down to the real disease. 
We will have to point out the anomalies, the 
injustices, the things in the world, where all 
men are God’s children, that must break the 
heart of the Father and deny the spirit of 
love. We will have to quicken conscience, 
and show that there is no salvation for any 
man which does not take him out of selfish- 
ness into the lives of others. But do not let 
us forget that there are countless people in 
positions of responsibility and privilege who 
long to find a right solution of the problems, 
and feel nearly powerless. Certain kinds of 
preaching fill them with despair because they 
do not suggest one single thing which they 
can do except come out of the world alto- 
gether and give up business or do something 
else which would cause endless confusion. 
They are anxious for guidance. - Surely there 
must be a really Christian way for them to 
follow now in their present situation, even 
amid the anomalies that belong to an in- 
dustrial system not yet fully Christianized. 
They are asking for help, and it is our business 


108 IN QUEST OF REALITY 


to help them, and to sympathize with them 
in their difficulties. How in these days is a 
man to be a Christian workman, a Christian 
employer, a Christian foreman, a Christian 
shopkeeper, a Christian stockbroker, a Chris- 
tian captain of industry, a Christian clerk ? 
For in the long run, the key of the posi- 
tion depends on people seeing the light in 
their own situation, and following it step by 
step. The better world comes into being by 
the creation of the Christian mind in every 
kind of man and his loyalty to it in his own 
situation. The new world begins there. 

The worst possible attitude for a preacher 
is that of a “Daniel come to judgment.” 
We have no right to ally ourselves with any 
one class in the community to the exclusion 
of our sympathy with others. Materialism 
and selfishness are not the prerogatives of 
any one class. The gospel of Christ in 
its total message will in some ways be as 
distasteful to King Demos as it is to King 
Croesus. All great changes come from 
within the individual. “‘ Be ye transformed by 
the renewing of your mind,” says Paul. Our 
chief business in this direction is with the 


SOME TYPES OF PREACHING 109 


mind of a converted man. We have to help 
people to realize the ethical nature of all 
Christian experience—that we cannot love 
God fully save through our love of men, or 
serve Him save through our service of one 
another ; that worship in the Church means 
an attitude to God the Father of His children 
which must be maintained in all our attitudes 
to life and to one another throughout the 
week; that the Christian way of life must 
penetrate our corporate relationships; that 
hatred is wrong wherever it is found; that 
force achieves no lasting spiritual result ; 
that only a spiritual advance makes progress ; 
that a man is not converted till he is thinking 
with the mind of Jesus about everything, and 
is walking in the light he sees. That kind of 
ethical preaching is, to my thinking, the only 
kind which is of use. 

It is one thing to knock Dagon from his 
throne, another thing to put the ark of God 
in his place. It is one thing to search 
conscience with the fire of our own hard 
judgments, another thing to turn upon the 
evil the light of God’s love. Our business is 
not only to be the instruments of the clean 


110 IN QUEST OF REALITY 


heart, but also the medium of the right spirit, 
without which the clean heart cannot be 
permanent—if indeed it can be achieved at 
all. The parable of the empty house is 
warning enough against a merely external 
reformation conducted by force or fear. 
Whatever we are able to do as preachers 
must be done in the region of the total 
attitude to life. If we can achieve a 
quickened conscience alive and restless, and 
with it such a sense of life’s true values in 
Christ as shall bring the spirit of detach- 
ment from position and possession, we shall 
have done a mighty thing in the region of 
Christian ethics. We shall have prepared the 
way of the Lord. 


Til 


But now let us pass on to think of doctrinal 
preaching. One gathers from many sources 
that the modern reaction against doctrinal 
preaching is somewhat abating. The war 
has done one sound thing at least in this 
region. It has revealed the need for a 
reconstructed view of the universe and for 
some clear, intelligent conception of God 


SOME TYPES OF PREACHING 111 


which can meet the challenge of a world in 
ruins. We have got to help our people into 
a theology. We have got to help them to 
think. Democracy, and Protestantism in the 
best sense of the word—two movements: 
which we believe have God in them, and took 
their rise upon a Christian view of the valua- 
tion of personality and of God’s way of help- 
ing men to be themselves—depend on minds 
which are willing to think for themselves, and 
will refuse the domination of either priest 
or demagogue whose passion is to keep 
grown men in the nursery. There are vague 
heresies in our day soaking down into the 
minds of ordinary people through various 
popular media, which we cannot meet with- 
out an intelligent and instructed Christianity. 
What do we mean by God? By His power, 
His government, His providence? Why is 
it really silly to touch wood when you have 
been boasting to people how long.it is since 
you had influenza? There is a whole wrong 
attitude to life cropping up in such simple 
superstitions which can only be met by a 
clear and reasonable view of God. And the 
age is very fruitful in superstition, which is 


112 IN QUEST OF REALITY 


the revenge of faith for its neglect. Or, 
again, what is the real nature of love, the 
meaning of the Cross? Why really did 
Jesus die, and how can it possibly have any 
relation to God’s forgiveness ? And what is 
forgiveness? Why should we forgive our 
enemies? A whole range of theological 
inquiry lies behind that last question. The 
only final answer to the question of forgive- 
ness demands a theology. Or, again, how 
does God help us? We simply cannot keep 
the feet of certain people from straying into 
the realm of magic in the search for God, until 
we have helped them into a reasonable 
doctrine of grace. People to-day are craving 
for definite teaching. They are feeling the 
need of a sound body of Christian doctrine. 
Preachers who have tried the experiment 
find that an audience of all ages and stages 
of capacity will listen intently to a sermon 
on the grace of God, or the meaning of 
salvation, or the Divine omnipotence; such 
subjects as would make those who claim to 
know ‘“‘ what the public want’ shake their 
heads and tell us how the pulpit is detached 
from life. The question in the long run, of 


SOME TYPES OF PREACHING 113 


course, is not what people want, it is what 
they need. A well-known picture-film artist, 
in giving an account of his methods lately, 
described how he made the experiment of 
trying to meet the public taste, but finally 
discovered that he had to follow his own 
ideas even to create a popular success. 
Many people do not know what they want, 
and preaching merely shaped to their passing 
moods would little satisfy them. But deep 
in their hearts there is the need for some 
clear thought of God and of His ways with 
us. It is surprising, for instance, how often 
people become bitter in trouble because they 
think God sent it, and we must be able to 
show them God’s real relation to us amid 
the sorrow and suffering of life. A reason- 
able view of Providence is part of the gospel, 
and may be, in point of fact, the way of 
salvation for a mind held up, by some 
snag of perplexity, from a whole-hearted 
devotion to Christ. Facts are not facts with 
any meaning till they are seen in their 
relations, and we cannot fully see Jesus, the 
people who want Him without any theo- 


logical entanglements notwithstanding, till 
8 


114 IN QUEST OF REALITY 


we see Him in the light of His universal 
relationships. 

It is just our suspicion of doctrine which 
has led to the rise of such strange growths 
as Christian Science, and to the popularity 
of spiritualism. These would never have 
attained their present proportions if it had 
not been that some instinct which they re- 
present has been denied its full satisfaction 
in Christian teaching. There is a doctrine of 
mental healing, of the connections between 
the body and the mind, in a truly Christian — 
outlook. And we have missed it with our — 
wrong views of God’s relation to pain and 
suffering, and our false ideas of the duty of 
resignation. A whole system of bad theology 
lies behind the Christian Science movement ; 
but it took its rise in protest against a de- 
fective system of Christian truth. The same 
thing is true of spiritualism, now happily 
losing its hold on the tortured minds of 
people ; but the fact of its popularity points 
clearly to the need of greater emphasis on 
the doctrine of immortality. 

Nothing will meet man’s true need but a 
doctrine which grapples with the facts of sin 


and redemption. We must not be afraid of 
wide horizons. It will often take the biggest 
view of God we can preach to heal even a 
trifling wound in some human heart. But | 
two things should be kept in mind. One is” 
that such doctrinal preaching must have the 
savour and the salt of practical life. Look 
at the genius of Christ. There is a whole the- 
ology implicit in the Parable of the Prodigal 
Son. There is enough in it to keep a preacher 
going for half a winter. There is not a 
word in it but is alive with reality. Doctrine 
has got to be a philosophy of Christian fact 
and experience which the people in front of 
us can grasp because it is set forth in terms of 
experience of their own. And the simplest, 
homeliest experience, as Jesus showed, is the 
truest symbol of spiritual reality. ‘In my 
Father’s house are many mansions ’’—a 
picture like that, which belongs to simple 
human life, has more in it of the elements of 
reality, and can give a clearer conception of 
Christian truth about immortality, than any 
metaphysical reasonings. It contains the 
seeds of doctrine, but it belongs in its language 
and symbolism to the realm of real experience. 


SOME TYPES OF PREACHING 115 


ooo 
= 
OO OO EE EEE Oe eee 


116 IN QUEST OF REALITY 


The other thing to be noted about doctrinal 
preaching is this. There are many people 
whose minds have long been set in a different 
mould of theological thinking from that 
which the modern outlook demands. It is 
our business to give them our newer views. 
We cannot help doing it, for our point of 
view will soon appear. Some of these people 
are already perplexed. They have some 
knowledge of scientific ways of thinking in 
other departments. They are holding the 
door between the two spheres of knowledge 
closed, though it is a hard struggle. They © 
are afraid if the two orders of experience 
should come to mix, there will be an explosion 
in which their faith will go up in fragments. 
It is very largely fear which is at the root 
of the bitterness of theological conflict—fear 
of those who hold the older view. But at 
times this is aggravated by the rashness of 
those who have taught the newer view— 
rejoicing, perhaps in the exuberance of youth, 
in the work of destruction. If we realize 
that fear is the bugbear we will take every 
means to supplant it by confidence. Think, 
for instance, of the opposition to the modern 


SOME TYPES OF PREACHING 117 


view of Scripture; it is due to a sense of 
quaking foundations. If we are going to deal 
with this properly we will take pains to make 
clear—before we attempt to detach them 
from the foundations of literalism—the true 
authority of Scripture, the authority which’ 
is the thing that, even now for people with 
the older view, if they only realized it, gives 
the Bible its power. We will seek to be 
positive, not dealing in mere denials; above 
all, not indulging in satirical observations on 
the absurdity of some old way of putting 
things. One can imagine nothing worse, 
for instance, than sarcasm on what may 
seem the crudity of old views of the Atone- 
ment. The truth is never served by any- 
thing which is unworthy of itself. It is 
our privilege to be reconcilers, not only 
between God and man, and man and man, 
but also between the old age and the new. 
If we are to be effective in this, we must 
first discover the spiritual content of the old 
view—the dynamic in it, the thing that 
brought people to their knees; for if in 
our new presentation we have not retained 
the moral and spiritual dynamic, we have 


118 IN QUEST OF REALITY 


missed something in our vision of the truth. 
Emerson says: “ In that protest which each 
considerate person makes against the super- 
stition of his times, he repeats step by 
step the part of the old reformers, and in 
the search for truth finds new perils to virtue. 
He learns again what moral vigour is needed 
to supply the girdle of a superstition. A 
great licentiousness treads on the heels of 
a reformation. ‘ Doctor,’ said his wife to 
Martin Luther one day, ‘how is it that 
whilst subject to papacy, we prayed so often 
and with such fervour, while now we pray 
with the utmost coldness and very seldom ?’””’ 
The newer views, let us remember, will stand 
or fall by their power to produce the reality 
of the old experience to-day for life and the 
world. One wonders if that is not where 
many moderns fall short. Are we helping 
men to fear sin as once they feared hell? 
Are we enabling them, with the modern views 
of the Atonement, to see the love of God in 
its redeeming passion, relating the Cross to 
man’s deepest necessity in such a way as to 
recapture the music of the phrase—“ He 
loved me, and gave Himself for me”? A 


SOME TYPES OF PREACHING 119 


traveller tells how in the heart of Africa he 
met a college friend working as a missionary 
—the last man he expected to see. ‘‘ What 
are you doing here?” he asked. “I came 
to pay my debt,” was the quiet answer. 
Are we offering men the kind of gospel which 
explains that ? 

We can only do our work of theological 
reconciliation in the measure in which our 
symbols of love—our theological windows— 
can take in, so to speak, as much of the 
real vision of God’s love as the old. There 
is no more pathetic plight than that of a 
preacher standing between the message of 
God and the needs of men, while the world, 
or his own heart, is saying to him: “Sir, thou 
hast nothing to draw with, and the well is 
deep.” In the last conversation which the 
late Dr. P. T. Forsyth had with one of his 
friends they spoke of our troubled age hunger- 
ing for a vision of God. And- Forsyth 
suddenly broke out: ‘‘ I would give more than 
I can say,” he said, ‘to get Spurgeon back 
again—Spurgeon with all his intellectual 
narrowness, but Spurgeon with his evan- 
gelical passion and his love-kindled heart.” 


120 IN QUEST OF REALITY 


We must be sincere with the truth. God 
has in our day shown us, and is continuing 
to show us, a way into a fuller and clearer 
light and a far more real religion than that 
of a generation ago. The truth will never 
fail us if we are loyal to it, and nothing but 
the truth will serve to help the world. The 
need is for clear thinking; but also for 
thinking which is thorough and historically — 
based. Tradition must not be our bond- 
slave ; the past experience of men must not 
be a chain. But we should beware lest, 
casting off tradition, we miss something to 
which it points, a light upon the face of 
Christ, seen and caught in some ancient 
formula, without which He cannot be in all 
His fulness, what He is—the light of all our 
modern day. 


TECLURE LV: 
THE TECHNIQUE OF PREACHING 


IT may argue a want of proportion to devote 
only one lecture to the subject of technique. 
But technique and method are _ largely 
dependent on other things—the preacher’s 
grasp of his message and the spirit of the 
man. If these are right with us, our instinct 
will tend to lead us naturally to a right 
method. A man in dead earnest, with a life- 
and-death case to put, which is the true 
preacher’s position, will feel his way to a 
right method. Through all kinds of im- 
perfections of style and delivery, his message 
will get itself “‘ across,’ to use a common 
word, while the most perfect techniqtie with 
no kindled passion or lit mind behind it, will 
make of preaching no more than a moderately 
pleasant entertainment. 

How independent Chalmers was of 
technique in certain directions! Here is a 


I2t 


122 IN QUEST OF REALITY 


description of his delivery from the pen of 
Dr. Caird. “No grandeur or dignity of 
person, no polish or refinement of speech or 
gesture, a voice without sweetness or melody 
and articulation thick or guttural, an accent 
not merely broadly Scottish but of undis- 
guised provincialism ; instead of command- 
ing and varied action following the changeful 
turns of thought and feeling, a continuous 
sawing of the air with one hand whilst the 
other followed the lines of a closely read 
manuscript. Such were the physical condi- 
tions which in the case of this orator seemed 
to render anything like eloquence impossible. 
Yet he broke through them all.’ And not 
only so, but when he preached in London 
two of the most polished orators in England, 
who were in his audience, confessed, “ He 
beats us all.’’ Needless to say, this is not 
cited for the relief of a tender artistic 
conscience, still less for our imitation. The 
worst possible style is one which imitates a 
defect or peculiarity in another whose genius 
or power has overcome it. Chalmers was 
Chalmers. The man was real through and 
through, and alive to the finger-tips with a 


THE TECHNIQUE OF PREACHING 128 


message for his age. First things must come 
first. What we need most to-day is not a 
new preaching method or technique, but a 
new vision of the preacher’s task and oppor- 
tunity. That would produce on the mitelsy 
halting lips the gift of tongues. 

But this is not to say that technique does 
not need attention. It needs it, just as much 
as a river channel needs to be cleared of snags 
and obstructions, and for a similar reason— 
that the truth may have “ free course and be 
glorified.” Anything on the one side or the 
other which draws attention to the preacher 
himself is a positive obstruction. The 
preacher whose style is so polished or whose 
technique is so impressive that people stop 
listening to his message to think of him, ts 
in that measure an impediment to his own 
power. We can add nothing to the power 
of the truth by any effort of our own. All our 
efforts in the direction of style or delivery 
must be devoted to make our speech and 
method a clear channel for truth, a mirror 
whose main glory is to vanish in the light it 
reflects. No doubt you know the differ- 
ence between an organist who is a real leader 


124 IN QUEST OF REALITY 


of praise and one who is a master of show 
effects. The one is a self-forgetful treasure ; 
the other is a self-conscious nuisance. The 
same thing may be true of a preacher. One 
of the worst effects of a bad style is that it 
keeps both preacher and people from a real 
sincerity. It produces a sense of strain and 
uneasiness in the atmosphere. The object 
of attention to method and technique should 
be to deliver both preacher and audience 
from consciousness of themselves and of one 
another, so that the message of God may 
become the dominating fact. 


I 


The first thing in sermon preparation 1s 
to get our subject. The subject may sbew 
contained in a text or an incident from 
Scripture ; or it may be found elsewhere, as, 
for instance, upon rare occasions, in some 
event of importance which is occupying the 
public mind: or insome poem or other literary 
work, though this also should only be upon 
occasion. I am not prepared to be dogmatic 
on the point, but I fear I can only admire at 
a distance the man who can find his subject 


THE TECHNIQUE OF PREACHING 125 


in secular literature. His purpose is to be 
respected, which is to get hold of the man 
who is more interested in, let us say modern 
poetry, than he is in the Psalms of David ; 
but the value of this method is very doubtful, 
except as an occasional variation. It is 
quite another thing, of course, when this is 
done in a class of special people. The main 
thing is our message, whatever our subject, 
but in general we will find the latter in some 
word or incident or book of Scripture. For 
remember the Bible is still the authoritative 
book on the Christian religion! And we will 
find, as we go on, that Scripture has this 
peculiar and unique quality of inspiration, 
that it plumbs depths which the human 
soul, even in the most profound of other 
literature, has never exceeded, while it em- 
bodies its experience in phrases and ex- 
pressions which are final, even from the 
literary point of view. ‘ 

How do texts come? Nothing can take 
the place of the study of Scripture; our 
business is to know the Bible. There will 
be little difficulty about finding subjects on 
which to preach if we are faithful to our 


in 


¢ 
# 


126 IN QUEST OF REALITY 


continuous study of the Scriptures. But a 
message often leaps at us from the reading 
and meditation which we do for our own 
spiritual culture. The best texts often come 
to us like other best things, when we are not 
directly seeking them. Life’s dealings with 
ourselves, as we seek in Scripture to find 
light for our own path, will break the 
envelope which wraps many a_ precious 
message, and do it better than anything else. 
The word men want to hear from us is the 
word which, through our own experience, 
God is speaking to ourselves. The message 
which is minted in the crucible of our own 
need alone bears the stamp of reality. Or, 
again, we may find our text suggested to us 
by some concrete case we have met with as 
our hearts are open to the sorrows and sins 
of others. That is really the same thing, for 
a Christian minister’s experience has, more 
than other men’s, a vicarious element. We 
will be constantly up against questions which 
people are asking, objections they may have, 
burdens which they bear, doubts and per- 
plexities they have to face. It is a good plan 
to ask ourselves what we have to say to such 


THE TECHNIQUE OF PREACHING 127 


and such an one, as the case comes to our 
notice. Nothing will challenge our minds 
more than to keep an open ear to the cry of 
spiritual need that is always breaking out, 
though it be unconsciously, from the defects 
and failures and sins of people around us. 
For all this, of course, we will need to be 
steeped in Scripture. It is both a means of 
keener insight into human need and a perfect 
answer to that need at whatever level we 
come upon it ; while, withal, it reaches depths 
we can neither see nor feel, searching the most 
hidden thoughts and intents of the heart. 
The open Bible, in every sense of the word, 
is the door that swings wide both to human 
need and God’s grace: the twofold revela- 
tion which it holds is to every true preacher 
a perpetual and dazzling discovery. 

Instinct will help us in our choice. If we 
are keen on our task, and thinking of our 
people, we will not naturally keep them on 
the same kind of diet. We will go in for 
contrasts. There is a danger of getting into 
ruts in our choice of subjects—a danger 
largely due to giving too little time to thought 
and study. We have a rushed week, and 


128 IN QUEST OF REALITY 


we take the line of least resistance, which is 
a text that makes an immediate appeal to 
our circle of ideas. That is the danger of 
reading for texts. We naturally choose that 
which is capable of easy or popular exposi- 
‘tion. The way to safeguard ourselves is to 
read, not for preaching, but for life and for 
truth. The preacher to whom the Bible is 
a land of adventure for his own mind and 
soul will have no difficulty about texts. 

But one or two things are worth atten- 
tion in choosing a subject. For one thing, 
we should go in for the big texts. There was 
a time when the ideal of many a preacher 
seemed to be to search the Bible for some 
little phrase or curious turn of a sentence, 
that might become a peg for a neat dis- 
course, well spiced with smart little epigrams. 
That day is over. Serious people have no 
time for sermons of that type. The others 
will not be reached by it. Let us get back 
to the big penetrating things about God, and 
life, and the troubles of the heart, which it is 
the business of the Bible to keep alive for us. 
A text is not worth preaching on, that only 
taxes our ingenuity. Take up a book of 


THE TECHNIQUE OF PREACHING 129 


sermons of Dale, or Beecher, or Phillips 
Brooks, or Lecky of Ibrox—in fact, of any 
man of more than a quarter of a century ago 
whose name as a preacher still lives to-day 
—and you will not find a trifling text in the 
whole book. It is the subjects that engage 
most deeply our own mind and spirit in 
preparation for the pulpit, that find the most 
ready audience when we come to preach— 
provided we are really ready to preach on 
them. Further, let us realize that the Bible 
contains a body of teaching on the great 
questions of life and destiny, and strive to 
bring the full circle of its message to the 
light. We need not intimate a series, let us 
say, on the teaching of Jesus or the message 
of Paul, but we should take care that the 
congregation is made familiar with the truth 
these represent. It is an excellent plan to 
make a series of sermons out of a story like 
the Prodigal Son, or a psalm like the Twenty- 
third, or the various stages in the conversa- 
tion of Jesus with the woman of Samaria, or 
the different ways in which Jesus elicited 
the practical response of faith in the people 
He was about to heal or to bring into the 
9 


130 IN QUEST OF REALITY 


peace of forgiveness. And what about the 
Beatitudes? The very marrow of real 
religion is there. It is a big task to make 
the average man understand what it means 
to be meek or poor in spirit, and to win his 
approval of ‘that way’”’; yet without deal- 
ing with such subjects we cannot introduce 
people to the secret of Jesus. Or, again, 
what a magnificent chance of helping people 
to realize how God speaks to us all through 
the medium of daily life, do the stories of the 
calls of the prophets put into our hands! 
What a fine series also of moving episodes 
do we find in the career of David—episodes 
in which there are aspects of spiritual man- 
hood that still “‘ take our hearts with beauty.” 
The needs of our people will, of course, guide 
our choice; or the situation in the world 
around us, as it opens up questions with a 
spiritual issue. The great festivals of the 
Christian year should be used far more than, 
in Scotland at least, they have been. They 
provide us with an opportunity, in an atmo- 
sphere created for us, of preaching on the 
great doctrines and historic facts of our faith. 
How many people, for instance, would be led 


THE TECHNIQUE OF PREACHING 1831 


to preach on the Resurrection, if it were not 
for the yearly return of Easter? Or how 
often would we think of preaching on the 
Holy Spirit, if Whitsunday did not demand 
that once a year, at least, we should take for 
our subject a doctrine so vital to the modern 
outlook on God? It is a good plan to take a 
book of the Bible, or an epistle, and expound 
it Sunday by Sunday, provided we do not 
take too long over it or try to do it too 
meticulously—in which case the people will 
not be able to see the wood for the trees, and 
will become wearied. No series ever ought 
to be too long; never more than, let us say, 
five or six Sundays continuously; never so 
long that the people have had time to forget 
what we began with. The best way to 
expound an epistle is to take it in passages, 
long or short, which deal with a particular 
subject, and select for the text the part that 
seems to contain the key to the leading idea. 
Many of the epistles can be treated in this 
way with advantage. 

A matter that will very soon rise in our 
minds will be the question of what difference 
we are to make between the subjects for 


132 IN QUEST OF REALITY 


morning and evening. Most people are in 
the habit of choosing for the morning some- 
thing more solid, demanding a deeper level 
of Christian experience ; and for the evening, 
something with a more popular appeal in the 
best sense of the word, bearing in mind that 
those who are on the fringe of religion, so 
to speak, generally choose the evening for 
their church attendance, and also the fact 
that we shall probably have a larger number 
of young people in the evening. Circum- 
stances, of course, differ. The danger is of 
falling into a habit, and forgetting—if our 
plan is what I have outlined—that the people 
who come in the morning may need the 
“milk”? as well as the ‘‘meat.’”’ Some of 
them, it may be, may need, even more than 
others, the elements of the gospel and the 
note of the evangel, for the very reason that 
their once-a-day attendance in the morning 
may be the sign of a more or less formal 
attachment. On the other hand, there will 
be people who can only come in the evening, 
but whose experience will demand the best 
we can give them. I often.take some of the — 
biggest subjects in the evening, though it 


THE TECHNIQUE OF PREACHING § 1338 


demands a bigger tax on my own mind to 
make the meaning intelligible, and keep the 
interest from flagging. As a general rule, of 
course, it is at the evening service that one 
would deal with subjects which are suited 
to beginners, to those who are feeling their 
way, to those whom we want to win for the 
first time. But it must never be forgotten 
that the audiences, even if we get two good 
congregations, will be largely different, and 
we must not fail to provide accordingly for 
definite and systematic teaching from the 
pulpit for both. As for the practice of 
choosing and advertising catchy titles, it 
would be surprising to learn that they ever 
achieved anything, except to cheapen the 
pulpit. It is certain that some of the 
preachers who use this method and hold the 
people, do not keep their audience by such 
expedients, though they may imagine they 
do: there is something in the man himself 
or his message which gets hold. It is a 
dangerous principle to think that we must 
stoop to win the ear of the people. The 
danger is that having stooped we may remain 
at the low level. Besides, people who go 


134 IN QUEST OF REALITY 


to be amused or entertained, seldom ‘‘ remain 
to pray.” If we do advertise a subject, 
which may be the right thing to do, let the 
title be as interesting as possible, but let it 
state the subject on which we mean to speak : 
avoiding the abstract, but shunning the way 
of guile. 


II 


Having found our text—or being found of 
it, which is the surest way, for nothing that 
does not hold us will hold our audience—the 
next thing is to make absolutely clear to our- 
selves what principle it yields, what is the 
main idea we mean to set forth. And along 
with that, we must ask what it is we want 
the people to do, or to think; in view, 
perhaps, of the correction of some error or 
_ misconception. What attitude to life are 
they to take up in response to it? Practical 
preaching in the best sense of the word 
depends on clarity and point. No truth 
which is not crystal clear to our own minds 
can possibly be made clear to those of our 
people ; and no truth which is not clear to 
their minds can possibly be of any use in 


THE TECHNIQUE OF PREACHING 135 


their lives. A foggy sermon is of no more 
value than a blurred photograph. Any 
extra effort we require from the people to 
grasp the truth we are expounding, beyond 
the legitimate demands of intelligent atten- 
tion, will weaken the force of its appeal. It 
is our business to get our message home. 
Practical preaching depends, too, on this— 
that no spiritual truth may be counted on as 
grasped by ourselves or by the people, till it 
has opened up a field of practical duty or 
service in which we may put it to the test. 
We must get into our minds what we want 
our hearers to do. Preaching must illumin- 
ate life or it is unreal. It is only in the 
terms of living experience that it can be 
laid hold of. And we must make sure of our 
aim before we begin. Many a sermon, as you 
will find, lags heavily, and has neither wings 
nor fire, because the aim has not been clear 
to the preacher’s own mind. Iam confident 
this is a most prolific cause of failure. The 
preacher does not know what he means to be 
at. All the time, he is fumbling blindly along 
a road he has but dimly seen, to an end he 
has not tried to picture. We may be out for 


136 IN QUEST OF REALITY 


a verdict or a decision or a conviction ; but 
it will never be a verdict in the abstract, or 
a conviction in general, or a decision in a 
vacuum. It-will be a verdict or a decision 
or a conviction, suggesting or demanding a 
definite act, or a definite attitude, in daily 
life. You will often have the experience of 
writing a sermon half through, and then 
finding yourself come to a full stop. Your 
mind is held up. The fount is dry. You 
may even begin to lose interest. Ten chances 
to one the real reason is that the truth has 
never gripped you with any definite in- 
tention. You have not been thinking with 
your people in your mind. You have no 
real and visible objective. The moment 
you pull yourself up and ask, What is the 
thing to achieve ? or, What am I driving at ? 
—and get that clear—the thing begins to 
kindle in your mind. Let me commend to 
you the simple questions which a great 
surgeon says he asks himself before an opera- 
tion. What is it I want to do? Is this the 
best means of doing. it? And is it worth 
doing? This last question, of course, may 
sometimes bring the shock of realizing that 


THE TECHNIQUE OF PREACHING § 187 


the thing you have in mind is, after all, not 
worth saying, or you have said it a fortnight 
ago, in which case you will have to find 
another subject. But that question should 
come early enough in our choice of a subject 
to give us time to find another. Here, how-’ 
ever, I would warn you against the danger 
of too readily laying aside a subject which 
has been selected, and with which headway 
has been made. One would almost say it 
should never be done. The very effort 
to conquer the difficulty will be an _ ex- 
cellent discipline. And what is even more 
important —through that effort we may 
reach a penetration of thought and a 
suppleness of expression which will in the 
end surprise us and make the difficulty a 
real place of discovery. 

In the second place, having found our main 
idea—the principle that lies behind—the next 
thing is to unfold it. There is no cut-and- 
dried rule for divisions, or for finding material 
to divide or expand. The most dangerous 
thing to do is to read, for the immediate 
purposes of preaching, sermons which others 
have written on the same text. I am not 


138 IN QUEST OF REALITY 


concerned with any nice points of plagiarism. 
We are all borrowers. If a sermon of 
mine helps another to get a message home, 
I would ask no better fruit of it. There is 
no reason why the material of other people's 
work in this direction should not be used, 
any more than there is that a political candi- 
date should not accept the help of others in 
providing material wherewith to win his 
election. Weare not out to preserve patents, 
or to win applause. We are out to win men 
to God, and anything which can help a man 
to a clear message he ought to use. The real 
danger of reading sermons for the immediate 
purpose of preaching on the same text, is the 
danger of living on peptonized food. The 
digestive process is done for us; and the 
digestive process, the struggle to see the 
truth in a clear shape, and work it out in a 
practical way, is the work whereby our mind 
wins power, and our personality masters and 
overcomes and penetrates our material. You 
will find the very same defect in trying to 
preach, after an interval, an old sermon— 
even one which you have chosen for re- 
petition because the afterglow of its interest 


THE TECHNIQUE OF PREACHING 139 


brought it to your recollection. Though you 
may be going to preach on the same text, do 
not merely read your old sermon. Think it 
out again. It is not our thought the people 
want ; it is, so to speak, us thinking. Doubt- 
less we may have to do some reading for a 
sermon. At the least we will look up the 
commentators in the hope that they may not 
spoil our text! My own plan is to read for 
most of the week on any line of study in 
which I happen to be engaged, but with the 
subject or text in my mind all the time, and 
to think of it at odd moments when out here 
and there visiting, etc. It is extraordinary 
how much material for a subject on which 
we are thinking comes to our hand in this 
way of indirect intention. Only towards the 
end of the week do I begin to get the message 
into form. I do not commend my plan. 
Every man must make his own. Much 
depends on the speed with which we are 
able to work. 

For the actual construction of the sermon 
no rules can be laid down. It depends upon 
the subject we are dealing with, the con- 
gregation we are speaking to, and the end 


140 IN QUEST OF REALITY 


we mean the sermon to achieve. There are 
sermons which should proceed by a series 
of logical steps to a conclusion. There are 
some that should proceed by stating a 
principle and making deductions of a practical 
kind, in order. There are sermons where the 
best plan is to state your main principle 
or central truth, be it some aspect of God's 
love or care, or some exhortation to practical 
duty, then think of three or four conditions 
of need among your people, or three or four 
spheres of life in which the duty should be 
operative, and proceed to apply it to these. 
For my own part I believe in divisions. It 
is a great help to our own minds for one 
thing, and I am sure it is a help to the people. 
It is better, however, not to announce them 
beforehand. The element of surprise should 
not be neglected. If you specially want 
them to remember your points, you can 
recapitulate at the end, but recapitulation 
needs careful handling. 

Having got your aim defined and your 
main line laid down, you can then pro- 
ceed to get the sermon into shape for 
preaching. 


THE TECHNIQUE OF PREACHING 141 


Til 


I have said nothing up to this point as to 
the mode of preaching, whether by reading a 
manuscript or by more or less free and direct 
speech from notes. No man can be dogmatic 
to another on this point, though he may 
advise. There are many things to be said on 
both sides. Reading from a manuscript has 
the advantage of delivering us from a certain 
nervousness ; it retains the possibility of a — 
good style; it gives balance ; it may secure 
against verbosity; it gets down the thing 
you mean to say in the form in which you 
feel it is best said; and to some extent, so 
far as language can do it, it captures and 
fixes the glow of the creative moment. 
Though it must be observed that there are 
read sermons which do no one of these 
things. On the other hand, the danger of 
a read sermon is that it may be out of 
touch with the audience. You can read a 
thing which you cannot naturally speak, 
and in a way you would never naturally 
say it to a group of people face to face. 
The only successful way to use a read 


142 IN QUEST OF REALITY - 


sermon is to speak from it, regarding it as 
verbatim notes. 

On the other hand, a sermon which is spoken 
more or less freely, or with only a few notes 
to guide the speaker, has numerous disad- 
vantages. It opens the way to repetition 
and verbosity, and tempts to laziness and 
to a false dependence on the mood of the 
moment—sometimes it results in a large 
admixture of “hot air,’’ instead of truth. 
Yet it has also many advantages. We get 
direct touch with the audience. We can 
use our material more pliably. With it, one 
is not in the danger of preparing a sermon as 
if it were to be preached in a vacuum. There 
is not the remotest doubt that the people 
prefer it, and that for the best of reasons, 
because it is more real and escapes the aloof- 
ness that often characterizes a read sermon, 
even when the preacher is throwing pointed 
shafts. I have noticed, again and again, 
where a man was half the time talking and 
half the time reading, that the interest faded 
as soon as his head got down to the manu- 
script, because for those moments his own 
attention was deflected. It is certain the 


THE TECHNIQUE OF PREACHING 148 


audience would prefer to listen to a good 
sermon spoken, even with grammatical slips 
and an occasional sentence that never came 
to earth, rather than to the most carefully 
prepared address delivered from a manu- 
script. That may be a wrong preference, | 
but if it be so, it is one of these melancholy 
weaknesses to which you will have to accom- 
modate yourself. I think if I were to look 
back on my experience, I should have to 
admit that the best sermons I have listened 
to were those that were read from a manu- 
script. But I do not think that is a fair test, 
for the preferences of a student of theology, 
with all respect, are no guide to the tastes of 
the average man. There is this also to be 
taken into account. The times are changing, 
and there is a new demand for reality which 
I cannot but feel the method of direct speech 
helps to supply. 

Whether we read fully or not, we have to 
keep in mind that a sermon is not meant to be 
a complete and more or less satisfactory pro- 
duction in itself—like, for instance, an essay 
or a book. People can read such at their 
leisure, absorb its flavour, study its niceties, 


144 IN QUEST OF REALITY 


and follow its reasoning. A sermon is the 
communication, through a person, of a 
message to persons who are there to listen 
for that moment and no longer. Keeping in 
mind that you have the moment—no more— 
and that it is the contact of mind with mind 
that is the business of that moment, you can 
choose your method. 

But whether it be read or spoken with 
more or less freedom, there are some other 
things to be kept in mind about the sermon 
preparation, after you have got the aim and 
the main lines. 

I. In the first place, the sermon should 
always be written. I am perfectly clear and 
unrepentantly dogmatic about this. Writing 
gives clearness. It enables us to solve those 
most difficult problems in sermon prepara- 
tion—the transitions from one point to 
another. The danger of not writing is that 
you may think you can trust to the moment 
to get across the chasm. It looks only a 
step, and you just let it go at that, and then 
you find, when you come to delivery, that 
you need a bridge which you have not got. 
You cannot cross naturally and simply and 


THE TECHNIQUE OF PREACHING 145 


inevitably, and you lose your audience in a 
flying leap which they cannot follow because 
they have not the mental agility to trace the 
connection in your mind. Study the transi- 
tions. Be careful of your logic. Writing 
fully, or more or less fully, will greatly help 
you to do this: that is one advantage of it. 

Another advantage is found in style and 
language. You will save yourself repetition. 
You will keep a good style. You will get 
balance and proportion, and not find, as you 
may do otherwise, that you have taken so 
long in your introduction that you have 
little left for the main substance. And it 
will really guard you against all kinds of 
mental slackness. One of the besetting sins 
of the ministry is indolence, including in- 
tellectual indolence. 

2. In the second place, a sermon should 
be written in a speaking style, whether it is 
going to be read or not. This means short 
sentences, and sentences which are not in- 
volved with metaphor or dependent clauses. 
A great many ministers would improve their 
style and get home more directly, if after 


writing their sermons they would go over 
Io 


146 IN QUEST OF REALITY 


them and strike out nearly all the conjunc- 
tions and relative pronouns. This sounds 
exaggerated. So it is, yet it is on the right 
lines; verbosity must go, if our style is to 
be good. A good many delightful phrases 
and attractive asides must be sacrificed. 
We have got to get to the end of the 
street in half an hour or thereabouts, and 
to take with us many people whose minds 
do not move quickly, so we have not 
time for many of the interesting sights 
upon the way. It is a fact that some 
preachers read their sermons, not because 
they cannot speak directly, but because they 
cannot deliver without reading what their 
sermons ordinarily contain. That is why a 
read sermon often misses the mark, and why, 
whether we read it or not, the sermon as 
written should be such that it would be pos- 
sible to speak it. If our reason for reading 
is that it is too involved, too crowded, too 
delicate in its suggestions for free delivery, 
we had better take it to pieces and scrap 
a good deal of it. 

Our language, then, must be simple and 
clear. There are words that sound most 


THE TECHNIQUE OF PREACHING 147 


satisfying which mean little or nothing to 
the mind. Never use a latinized word if | 
you can get a homely Saxon equivalent ; or 
a word of two syllables, if one will do. Mr. 
Asquith, introducing a book on the legacy 
of Rome, quotes Cardinal Newman with — 
approval: “‘ Latin is comparatively weak, 
scanty, and unmusical, and requires consider- 
able skill and management to render it ex- 
pressive and graceful.’’ This is also true of 
latinized English. It may produce senten- 
- tious oratory. It does not make for clear 
terse speech. The words that are in the heart 
and mouth of the ordinary man about real 
things are all short and simple. You may 
not think this is important; yet it may 
make all the difference between success and 
failure of the message. As you cultivate a 
good simple style—one which conveys most 
exactly and clearly your meaning, the mark 
of a good style—you will find that in speaking 
freely it will become a native instrument. 
Simple words, however, do not necessarily 
mean simple or poor ideas, nor high-sounding 
phrases a profound intelligence. The exact 
opposite is often the case. Our business calls 


148 IN QUEST OF REALITY 


upon us to bring the most profound and mov- 
ing ideas home to the minds of the simplest, 
to break through the walls of ignorance with 
a big message, to enter lowly doors with 
the whole counsel of God. It challenges all 
our resources of thought and imagination to 
take this big message through these lowly 
doors. It takes all our ingenuity of mind 
and heart. Many men are limited to-day 
in their capacity to take in spiritual truth, 
for reasons into which I need not enter. But 
if we cannot bring the message of God to 
bear on these people, whatever the level of 
intelligence, whatever the outlook, we have 
no message for our time. It can be done if 
we will set ourselves to it, and, from the point 
of view of reality in style, be mercilessly 
critical of our own work. I cull at random a 
few sentences which stress these conclusions. 
They are taken from a sermon by Henry 
Ward Beecher on the Church’s Duty to the 
Slaves, in which he urges that the Church 
should be competent to supply the needs of 
the poorest and lowliest, alike with the most 
cultured and intelligent. ‘‘ A man that is to 
the last degree cultured in thought and in 


THE TECHNIQUE OF PREACHING 149 


language may be acceptable to all men, so 
that he present the universal letter of intro- 
duction—the feeling that brings heart to 
heart, high and low. But often pulpits are 
made partial by a way of treating subjects 
that is partial and excluding... . Let a 
man discuss the love of Christ not as a living, 
flaming fact made clear to the comprehension 
of every child, but as an abstract thing, and 
he will remove it beyond the range in which 
the common mind walks. As far as the 
benefit of the average classes in society is 
concerned, you might just as well preach in 
Greek, as in abstract language. . . . The use 
of latinized words and periphrases, in what 
is called elegant speaking and fine writing, 
is acommon vice. There is a great tendency 
on the part of writers and speakers to avoid 
domestic words and colloquialisms, as they 
are called. ... What does home mean? 
When you speak that word it is as if you 
struck a beehive and a thousand bees begin 
to buzz and hum music in your mind. Father 
and mother are words that children learn on 
the hearth: and im’ the nursery... : . The 
man that knows how, like old Bunyan, and 


150 IN QUEST OF REALITY 


like Baxter, to take the Saxon colloquial 
terms of the household, of the kitchen, of 
the parlour, of the nursery, of the field, where 
men live, and employ them in his preaching, 
is a powerful and eloquent preacher. These 
old brawny, large-meaning words, heavily 
laden with precious associations, are words 
of might. But how many of our preachers, 
for the sake of being literary, for the sake of 
being polished, step aside from the great 
highway of power in language, into the little 
lanes of exclusiveness, where there is no 
power !”’ 


IV 


Let me say a word or two now regarding 
the various parts of the sermon. Let us 
think, to begin with, of the introduction. 
That will probably be the last part of the 
sermon you will prepare before writing it. 
Some people work for a striking introduction 
that they may win the ear of the audience 
at the beginning. It is possible to be too 
striking in one’s introduction, so that two or 
three things may happen. The preacher may 
not be able to keep up the vivid interest of 


THE TECHNIQUE OF PREACHING 151 


his beginning. He may draft off so much 
nervous attention on the part of the audience 
that they have nothing left to accompany 
him to the end, for it must be remembered 
that an audience has only a certain capacity 
in this direction, and can become nervously 
exhausted by something too hectic or thrilling 
at the start. Or, again, the preacher may 
make a false start and get the attention of 
the people by something which has really 
nothing to do with his line of thought ; in 
which case, when he has finished his intro- 
duction, he has by a violent transition to 
begin over again. His introduction in such 
a case is really a waste of time. Or, again, 
the introduction may be so obvious in its 
design of securing interest that it misses fire. 
The best way to begin is simply and naturally, 
remembering that the whole value of the 
opening sentences is to get on easy and 
natural terms with the people. The first 
thing we have to do is to bring our relation 
with the people in the matter of speaking 
and listening, to a basis of reality, so as to 
make them forget that we are preaching and 
that they are listening. It is best then to 


152 IN QUEST OF REALITY 


begin with something quite simple and easy, 
something that does not demand a great 
effort of mind. Relate the circumstances of 
the incident; or describe the context of the 
passage, or give a picture of the background ; 
get the people, in short, into the feeling of 
the situation if it be an incident, or into 
the attitude of need or curiosity which first 
elicited the truth. The introduction will 
depend on our subject. It will also depend 
on our aim. It spoils a good sermon both 
to flounder about unable to rise from the 
ground, and to hover and circle uncertainly 
in the air because you have not made up 
your mind where you are to come down. 
But of that more anon. 

With regard to the body of the sermon, 
little suggestion can in particular be made, 
except this, that a weak point or argument, 
or one comparatively unimportant in the 
| movement, should come before a strong one, 
and our strongest point should come last. 
The stronger ones should be stated in stronger 
terms. If we are stating objections for the 
purpose of disposing of them, we must make 
sure that we do not state them so strongly 


THE TECHNIQUE OF PREACHING 153 


that our answers strike the audience as weak. 
This is not to suggest any kind of juggling with 
truth ; it is just dealing with a very common 
fault. There are people who are tempted in 
justice to an opponent to make an over- 
generous statement of his case, and one which 
they are not able to refute. If you cannot 
put the truth more strongly and cogently 
than the opposition to it, you are not ready 
to preach on it. There is always the danger 
that some in our audience may be caught 
by something we say, and held so vividly 
by it, that they miss the qualification which 
follows. This is, of course, one of the diffi- 
culties about all preaching of the argumenta- 
tive type. 

It is useful to proceed occasionally by 
question and answer, and not by a series 
of bald statements. We must awaken the 
people, challenge them to think, kindle their 
minds to curiosity and search. Many of the 
most impressive statements are made in the 
form of the rhetorical question, though I use 
that word ‘‘rhetorical’’ merely as a defini- 
tion, for rhetoric is the born foe of reality 
in preaching. 


154 IN QUEST OF REALITY 


The use of fitting illustration will naturally 
engage our attention. Illustrations serve a 
double purpose. They illuminate—and they 
do so even more than we are aware—for life 
is always a medium for God’s revelation. 
They give a rest both to the mind of preacher 
and hearer. They make a new jumping-off 
ground from which you can proceed with 
fresh power, while they arrest the flagging 
attention. Remember, that the average 
hearer is always looking to you to state your 
truth in terms of life, and illustration is one 
way of doing this. If we are trying to state 
a truth to a single hearer in conversation, it 
is highly probable that his mind is applying 
it and illustrating it for himself as we speak, 
if indeed he does not pull us up to ask us for 
a practical example. Illustrations should, of 
course, be fitting and to the point. Never 
put in an illustration for ornament. It 1s 
sure to be false. An illustration may be a 
picture flashed out in a phrase, or it may be 
a picture described at length, a story from 
history, an incident from literature. All 
great literature is great because it is a mirror 
of life, and a sound knowledge of literature is 


THE TECHNIQUE OF PREACHING 155 


for this, among many reasons, essential to a 
preacher. It gives insight into aspects of 
life we cannot know at first hand. It does 
not much matter what illustrations a man 
uses provided they illustrate, and introduce 
no jarring note. The mood of one sermon 
will permit, as illustrations, stories of simple 
pathos, of tragedy, of experiences of our own, 
while the same kind of stories might be 
utterly out of place in sermons of another 
mood. We should never be afraid, however, 
to be simple and homely in our illustrations. 
In some respects the simpler these are, the 
better, always provided they help to make 
truth real. We will be quite safe, from the 
point of view of simplicity of style (though 
not, of course, of subject), in taking our 
audience on the level of children of thirteen 
or fourteen. The best illustrations, like the 
best quotations, are from the stories of 
Scripture, though it can never be taken for 
granted that they are known to the hearer, 
and they should be told as freshly and vividly 
as possible. There is drama there, and 
romance and poetry of the first order—all 
tested as the medium of spiritual truth by 


156 IN QUEST OF REALITY 


a racial experience which is centuries old. 
It has the additional advantage that it will 
be new to at least some people, and will help 
to increase*their knowledge of Scripture, of 
which the ignorance is colossal. I remember 
reading not long ago, in a speech of one of 
France’s most prominent men, the remark : 
“As the great English writer, Hall Caine, 
has said, ‘O death, where is thy sting ?’”’ 
You will not be preaching to a distinguished 
Frenchman every day, but there is evidence 
enough that this kind of ignorance is not 
confined to the other side of the Channel. 
Never forget this: in illustration, as in 
everything else, the governing factor is that 
our business is to get our message home, 
not to write a beautiful or artistic sermon. 
Everything must be subordinated to that. 
An illustration which is not a medium, is 
an intrusion, or a blind alley. 

And now for the sermon’s conclusion. 
Do not study too much to end effectively. 
The sermon ought to end when it is done, 
when the message has got home. Stop when 
you have finished. Stop with something 
which will clinch your argument or point 


THE TECHNIQUE OF PREACHING 157 


your application. Do not be afraid, upon 
occasion, of the definite appeal, provided it 
be natural. If it be real, it will be effective. 
Never mind what people think, so long as 
you get there. But one thing should be said : 
we will probably find the need, again and 
again, of bringing our audience back to the 
central facts of the gospel. For it is a gospel 
we are preaching, even if we are outlining a 
duty or exhorting to some new attitude, and 
nothing we say to that end will be possible 
of achievement save in the atmosphere of 
the Christian resources. It is only in the 
presence of Christ, so to speak, that you can, 
for instance, bid your hearers love their 
enemies, or face some bitter road with 
patience, or take up some lonely burden with 
hope. Without the atmosphere of Christian 
love which penetrates and interpenetrates 
the Gospels, the Sermon on the Mount is so 
much dream-stuff, the starkest folly. It is 
only in the air of a spiritual world in which 
God is Father, that the way of Christ has 
power as well as music in it. If we do not 
also reveal the Christian life as a fellowship, 
the Christian ideal will do nothing for people 


158 IN QUEST OF REALITY 


c¢ 


but awake what Watson calls “ the torment 
of the difference’’; and our business is to 
leave men with as deep a sense of the dynamic 
of duty or service, as of its stern compulsions. 
Consequently, all roads of argument or 
appeal will lead straight back to Christ, as 
Spurgeon boasted his sermons did. We will 
leave our people there to work it out with 
Him, more conscious of the strength than 
of the strain. ‘‘ Courage and faith,” says 
Stevenson somewhere, “‘is a good note to 
end on’’; but the highest note is that on 
which John Wesley ended his life: ‘“‘ The 
best of all is, God is with us.’’ Wherever 
we lead our people in thought or daring or 
adventure, God’s grace must dominate all. 


V 


Now let me speak just a word about 
delivery. If we are going to read our 
written sermon we must have it so prepared, 
so familiar to our mind, that it is supple. A 
sermon which goes into the pulpit with the 
ink barely dry is doomed to failure. We will 
not be in it, and if we are not in it, the power 
is gone. For preaching is truth mediated 


THE TECHNIQUE OF PREACHING 159 


through personality, our eager, kindled, and 
invigorated mind. The best preachers from 
read sermons never give one a feeling they 
are reading. 

As to the method of more or less free 
delivery, the best way is to read the sermon 
over carefully, thinking it out quietly the 
while, and to get into our mind several 
things—the illustrations, which will be an 
invaluable aid to memory and directness, 
the statement of our main truths in the form 
in which we want to convey them, the outline 
of our argument, and the conclusions on 
which we mean to end our chief points. 
We can be sure then that we will always be 
able to get home, even though we lose our 
way now and then on the road. To 
memorize a sermon and read it off the back 
of one’s mind is like reading from a manu- 
script, so far as the distraction of our grip 
on the people is concerned. If we cannot 
do anything else than this we had far better 
read. 

In delivery, use the conversational tone. \ 
We need elocution to deliver us from the 
unnatural voice and the false tone, and to 


160 IN QUEST OF REALITY 


give us voice production which will enable 
us to talk without strain or discomfort. 
Good natural voice production will go a long 
way to give the sense of reality. How much 
of the unreality of religion and the unreality 
of preaching itself, even in the material of 
a sermon, is due to the preaching voice, only 
the recording angel can compute. For there 
are things a man will say with an unnatural 
voice he would never dare to say in a con- 
versational tone. It would sound too 
ridiculous. Reality in voice is a most 
powerful help to reality in impression and in 
the message itself. Why is it that when 
some men read the newspapers aloud they 
read simply, whilst whenever they begin to 
read the Scriptures they are like a man 
walking on stilts? I remember listening to 
a minister giving a political address. He 
was in real earnest, and it was simple, 
natural, gripping stuff; but in the middle 
of it he had occasion to quote Scripture. At 
once he changed his note, and the people 
yawned till he was done. You cannot say, 
“God is love,” in any kind of unnatural tone 
which will make it more impressive than it is. 


THE TECHNIQUE OF PREACHING 161 


How much the actual structure of the pulpit 
is to blame I do not know. I remember an 
Anglican clergyman whose service I attended 
beginning his service by coming out from the 
chancel to a little raised platform and talking 
to the people about prayer, in preparation 
for the service. It was a first-rate address, 
delivered naturally and simply, and the 
people were held. Then he went through 
the rest of the service, ending with a sermon 
from the pulpit. But the introductory 
address seemed the only thing that was real. 
The rest was like watching a man walking 
and talking in a dream. I sometimes think 
that most of our pulpits are too high. We 
have literally to talk down, and we get into 
the way of doing it metaphorically. 

Of course a great deal of unnaturalness is 
due to self-consciousness, with which I want 
to deal later on. We start thinking of our- 
selves and so get on to a wrong note, and 
then do not know how to get off it. The 
audience feels it. They cough. They are 
restless. The sermon may be good enough. 
What is wrong? Ten chances to one it is 


the suggestion of strain, of unreality, in our 
If 


162 IN QUEST OF REALITY 


tone. We must somehow get on to natural 
terms with our audience, and a calm, quiet, 
natural voice will do it as nothing else will. 
Sometimes an interruption is a godsend. It 
may be the best thing that could happen, if 
we can take it so, and overcome it. It may 
knock us off the stilts, and bring us and the 
audience to the point where we have to talk 
realities in a real way. 

In conclusion, let us remember we are not 
priests ; we are not even officials. We must 
even forget that we are ministers. Spiritual 
truth can only be mediated through relations 
that are simple and human. We can only 
help our fellows in the measure in which we 
can make them feel that we are one with 
them. The truth of the Incarnation has its 
point of glory and of power just there. 


LECTURE V 
THE PREACHER HIMSELF 


IF any apology be needed for devoting a whole 
section to the preacher himself, it can be 
found in the definition of preaching as spiritual 
truth mediated through personality. Only 
through the right kind of personality can 
there be effective preaching. As Phillips 
Brooks puts it : ‘‘ The preparation of a preacher 
is the making of aman.”’ What makes a good © 
preacher is what makes a good man. It may 
seem a daring thing to say, but the faults of 
much preaching are not primarily faults of 
style or manner or method, but faults of 
character. You do not get to the root of the 
faults till you get down to character itself. 
Milton has these striking words about the 
making of a poet which are also applicable to 
the making of a preacher: ‘“‘ He who would 
not be frustrate in his hope to write well in 
laudable things, ought himself to be a true 


poem ; that is, a composition and pattern of 
163 ; 


164 IN QUEST OF REALITY 


the best and honourablest things ; not pre- 
suming to sing high praises of heroic men or 
famous cities, unless he have in himself the 
experience and the practice of all that is 
praiseworthy.’ It comes to this, then, that 
the final secret of good preaching is the 
preacher’s own right relation with God. There 
» is no approach to reality till we are real. 

For one thing, our power to help people 
springs ultimately only from our own experi- 
ence of the truth as it has been working in 
our own hearts, and as we have seen it working 
in the lives of others—seen it, that is to say, 
with that sympathy which brings a shared 
experience. We cannot carry conviction an 
inch beyond what we know. We will there- 
fore need to set ourselves to live by the truth 
we proclaim. A noted preacher tells that 
before he preached on a text, he made its 
truth the light of his own daily path for a 
week beforehand. That seems a trifle arti- 
ficial. But it illustrates this important point, 
that we cannot preach the gospel with real — 
confidence or urgency or with that sure touch 
which tells, unless, like Bunyan, we “ carry 
that fire in our own hearts we bid them beware 
of.’ Then, like him, having been true to our © 


THE PREACHER HIMSELF 165 


experience in our preaching and refused to 
go a step beyond what we know, we can 
rejoice in every new discovery for the sake 
of our people. ‘ After this,” says Bunyan, 
“ God led me into something of the mystery 
of union with Christ. Wherefore this I dis- 
covered and showed to them also.”’ It is an 
excellent plan to preach on truth of which you 
yourself are feeling the need, in some malady 
or some hunger of your own soul. This 
might seem a dangerous practice if it were 
not for the fact that a true minister’s moods 
are not self-induced or self-centred, but come 
largely from the lights and shadows which 
fall on other people to whose lives he is open. 
Even if it were not so, it is curious how an 
individual experience which we imagine is 
solitary is shared by numberless other people, 
all unknown and unsuspected. Mark Ruther- 
ford tells of the revelation which came to 
him after he had published his Autobtography, 
of how an individual cry may voice a universal 
need. Thousands of letters reached him 
telling how he had stated just their particular 
case, while he imagined he had been stating 
only his own. Again and again we shall find 
the very word of God, by letting some mood 


166 IN QUEST OF REALITY 


which has been possessing us for a while find 
its expression Godward if it be high, or its 
answer in God if it be low. Weare depressed ; 
perhaps we do not know why. Then let us 
just face it, and search out for ourselves the 
consolations we need—the truths which in 
this sombre hour of the spirit when all kinds 
of drifting shadows are about, will bring the 
inextinguishable light. Thinking it out for 
ourselves, if we are real enough not to be 
put off with shelters and evasions, we shall 
discover the truth for others. Only what 
we ourselves are living by, can be really food 
for our people. 


I 


But to go deeper: the faults of much 
preaching—the big faults—are ultimately the 
faults of an outlook from which we are seeking 
to deliver our people. I have tried already 
to show what are the main defects in the 
outlook of people to-day. 

There is fear, for instance ; and fear is one 
of the defects of the preaching temper. We 
may be tempted to be afraid of our audience, 
of some one in our audience. We may have 
an overweening concern for the sceptical or 


THE PREACHER HIMSELF 167 


materialistic outlook of some individual, with 
the result that our preaching is strained to 
meet it, and so loses balance. We may, for 
instance, develop arguments that aim at 
meeting one special case, when what is wanted 
is a calm and confident faith in our message’ 
tomeet every case. This universal message is, 
if only we knew it, just that for which people 
who appear to have a special need, are waiting. 
There is no greater mistake, by the way, than 
to try to rise to the intellectual level of some 
one person in our audience whom we are 
seeking to win. The best type of sermon is 
that which can be received by the woman 
from her kitchen and the scholar from his 
study. You will have them both in your 
audience, and you will have to find a medium 
that suits them both. Fear may arise from 
many causes. It may come from a sense of 
social or intellectual inferiority, or from the 
pride that hates to fail, and that cannot brook 
contempt or unpopularity or personal con- 
flict. It is a curious fact in this connection, 
that the things we imagine will hurt people 
are not generally the things that actually do 
so. And the people we imagine may be hurt 
are often the last people to be so affected. 


168 IN QUEST OF REALITY 


In any case, the right way to deal with our 
fears is not to repress them by any artificial 
screwing of our ‘“‘ courage to the sticking 
place.” It can only be banished by a con- 
fidence that falls back upon God, and relies 
for its power on His truth, and for its reward 
on His peace. 

Again, there are our false values. Do not 
these mar preaching ? How many preachers 
are slaves to a wrong standard of success ? 
We are proud of the big congregation, when 
we should rather be proud of the Christian 
spirit in the few. We count success by 
numbers, when we should count it in the 
signs, here and there, which speak of the 
new heart. We are the bondslaves of 
statistics, which may tell nothing, or may 
even be the indication of a spurious success. 
Principal Rainy’s well-known phrase, ‘a 
popular unblessed minister,’’ has a sinister 
warning in it—though, of course, unpopu- 
larity is not the infallible hall-mark of 
blessedness. We are tempted to think of — 
adherents in terms of cash value or social 
prestige. Not that these things are to be 
despised. They may mean a possibility of 
wider influence. To help into a Christian 


THE PREACHER HIMSELF 169 


outlook, for instance, a man who runs a large 
factory may be a stroke of incalculable value 
for the Kingdom of God. Some of the most 
earnest and loyal Christian people will be 
found among those of means and position, 
for the very reason that faith has wrought 
itself out in a virility of character that has 
brought them into places of leadership and 
power. But a congregation of prosperous 
people may be no evidence of our spiritual 
power. It all depends on what terms we 
have got them. The escape from these false 
values and their miserable tyranny, is to find 
our own joy in the truth and in our own 
right relations with our Master, leaving 
results to Him. It was in no spectacular 
vision of success that Jesus saw Satan as 
lightning fall from heaven, but in the power 
of His disciples to cast out devils in His 
name. 

Again, is there not in preaching a real 
danger of some barrier? Some sermons are 
soaked in the sense of superiority. It is 
possible to fear our audience; it is also 
possible to despise them, to be conscious of 
intellectual superiority, to deal cavalierly 
with what may seem to us trifles, but in 


170 IN QUEST OF REALITY 


very truth may be the iron bars of ignorance 
or real perplexity. What seems a very little 
difficulty may be the index of a trouble that 
demands a radical change in the whole out- 
look. This superior temper is often evident 
in relation to wrong ideas of the older type. 
We have to learn to be very patient with 
those who differ from us and very humble in 
our efforts to help them to see; always, in 
certain cases, “ thinking it possible that we 
may be mistaken,’’ as Fox bade Cromwell do, 
and never carrying the air of one who looks 
wiser than any man is fit to be. Let us not 
forget that the real test of enlightenment is — 
whether it develops in us a more Christian 
temper and helps us to do better service. 
No advance in theoretical truth that does not 
mean a personal advance for us in sympathy 
with others and the power to understand 
them is really a religious advance. If the 
truth we profess to have seen does not make 
us better men than did the wrong outlook from > 
which we profess to have escaped, we may well 

ask ourselves if we have really seen the truth © 
with that insight which means nearness to 
Christ. Paul’s distinction is valid still: ‘‘ Mere 
knowledge puffeth up, but love buildeth up.” 





THE PREACHER HIMSELF 171 


_ Yet again: may there not be religious ~ 
unreality in our preaching because there is 
unreality in our lives? Forgive me if here 
I suggest to you one peril of the ministry. 
It is to make the preaching of the gospel a 
substitute for walking in the way ourselves. 
Dr. L. P. Jacks says that “‘ one of the most 
strongly marked features in the orator’s 
moral psychology is a tendency to get con- 
fused between what he really believes himself 
and what he only wants other people to 
believe.’ This he applies particularly to 
political oratory, but we may well turn the 
searchlight on the preacher. Is it not just 
as true of us sometimes that “‘ when principles 
we have advocated must be put into action 
we may make the discovery that in spite 
of our vehement desire that other people 
should believe in them, we have never 
believed in them ourselves”’? We speak of 
the love of Christ, and paint Him in colours 
which glow with the emotion of our hearts, 
but there may be nothing more. Our visions 
of love and righteousness and social duty may 
become a phantasy in which we live, making 
of it a substitute for a real experience and 
a patient service. Dante in the Paradiso 


172 IN QUEST OF REALITY 


tells how he had been giving an eloquent 
description of faith in answer to a question, 
when his mentor replied : 

“Current is the coin 

Thou utterest, both in weight and in alloy. 

But tell me, if thou hast it in thy purse.” 
Our religious emotions may find expression 
in preaching instead of, as they ought, in 
life, in our attitude to others, in our 
relation to daily experience. A well-known 
doctor said to a friend of mine that he had 
seen many people die of a certain lingering 
disease, and the weakest hearted and most 
irritable among them were clergymen. This 
is obviously an exaggeration; every such 
case would be conspicuous, simply because 
something different was expected. But it 
strikes the note of warning, that we ourselves, 
offering a gift to the people, may mistake 
its description for its real possession. We 
can be sure that preaching which is not 
founded on real experience will very soon 
lose the accent of reality, and the people 
will quickly detect it; while the loss of joy 
and of vital interest in preaching inevitably 
follows from the loss of our own real relations 
with God. How to keep alive the evan- 


THE PREACHER HIMSELF 173 


gelical note or to recapture it, is a problem 
for which there is but one solution : we must 
recover the evangelical experience. The man 
who has lost the sense of his own forgiveness, 
humbling and exalting at the same time, will 
very soon have nothing to say, and, later 
still, have no one to whom to say it. Fresh- 
ness in preaching springs ever renewed 
from a heart which is daily subdued to the 
wonder of God’s gracious personal love to 
one’s own soul. 


Il 


It comes to this, does it not, that the 
subtle peril and weakness of all preaching is 
the tyranny of self in various forms? One 
form of it is the vanity of success. That 
kind of vanity is a standing temptation of 
the ministry. It may appear on various 
levels—in a wrong exaltation if we succeed, 
in a wrong humiliation if we fail. And what 
miseries it can inflict on us: the craving for 
sympathy, for applause and appreciation, 
for signs that perhaps never come; the 
shrinking from criticism, from anything that 
disturbs our self-esteem. I suppose it is 
natural to enjoy praise, but it is not Christian 


174 IN QUEST OF REALITY 


to depend upon it. We shall be constantly 
trying to help our people to do their Christian 
work for “ the joy of the working.’ We will 
need to take the same counsel to ourselves. 
Another form of self is what we call 
self-consciousness. Some are more troubled 
by this than others. It is the frequent 
cause of the nervous breakdown. The 
symptoms are various. We may get stage- 
fright or something like it, and find it a 
struggle to face an audience. We may have 
a lapse of memory and become haunted by 
the fear of breaking down. Self-conscious- 
ness may come, of course, from causes that are 
purely physical. No man has any right to 
neglect his health: his whole spiritual out- 
look will suffer, and what he takes for some 
sickness of the soul or some prophetic vision 
of a world going to destruction, may only be 
due to a disordered digestion. But more 
often than not the cause of self-conscious- 
ness lies deeper. It may be a sense of 
inferiority springing from the struggle in 
youth against long odds, and demanding for 
compensation and for confidence some re- 
ward of ambition to set against a world that 
once ignored or despised us. The man wants 





THE PREACHER HIMSELF 175 


to succeed. He is ambitious. He becomes 
afraid of failure. He is morbidly sensitive 
to any want of recognition. His joy in 
preaching is a form of self-glorification. His 
fine passages are all a source of vanity. It 
Is a poor picture I am drawing, but it is a_ 
very true one, and reveals a peril familiar to 
coy: preachers. The real trouble, where a 
‘man is a victim to it, is that he is not really 
out for the Kingdom of God; success or 
failure are all turned inward. It is fatally 
easy to seek ourselves when we think we are 
seeking the souls of men. And many a man 
is aware of it. He may indeed apply to him- 
self a veritable scourge, and make all kinds 
of efforts to escape from the prison-house of 
self. And often in vain. For self-conscious- 
ness is a perfect prison-house, and a wise man 
will take sharp measures with it at the very 
beginning of its tyranny. In all its subtle 
forms it is the ruin of power and peace. The 
liberation of our personality in all sorts of 
ways comes through emancipation from self, 
and how to effect this escape is worth learn- 
ing at the beginning of our ministry. One: 
way is to become absorbed in the truth we’ 
have to speak, and in the needs of the people 


176 IN QUEST OF REALITY 


to whom we have to speak it. I have known 
preachers find complete deliverance from 
this form of nervousness just by looking at 
the people and thinking quietly of their needs 
and of the task of helping them. A nervous 
person trying to cross a stream by a narrow 
plank must look, not at the stream, but at 
the opposite bank which he wants to reach. 
To see the world as it is, and to realize afresh 
our own call from God to help it, will soon 
deliver us from self-consciousness. If our 
self-consciousness should arise from a sense 
of our own defects and unfitness, a thing 
which cripples more men than we are aware 
of, the way to escape from that, is to realize 
that such self-humiliation is often a disguised 
form of pride: to resolve just to accept our 
limitations and stop thinking about them ; 
doing the very best we can and leaving the 
quality of our work to be judged by our con- 
science solely on the ground of faithfulness. 
One of the most fatal diseases that can over- 
take a minister, apart from the itch for popu- 
larity, is to become sensitive about what others 
—especially other ministers—may think of his 
preaching. Everything that takes a sermon 
out of its proper environment, which is the 


THE PREACHER HIMSELF 177 


mood in which it is written and the audience 
it is meant for, and makes us judge it like a 
picture or a bit of artistic furniture, is bad 
for preaching. It is a wrong standard to use 
in our preparation, and it is equally the wrong 
standard for criticism whether of our own 
work or that of others. We ought to help 
one another—even to criticize one another— 
but only in sincerity and with the true aim of 
preaching in view, which is to help people to 
see God—never to produce something that ts 
fine. There is a criticism of preaching which 
is simply fuel to those hidden fires of vanity 
or of bitterness that lay waste the power of 
many aman. We have got to get into the 
position of St. Paul: ‘‘ For me it is a very 
small matter that I should be judged of you 
or of man’s judgment. Yea, I judge not 
mine own self. But He that judgeth me is 
the Lord.”” And the things that count so 
much with the undiscerning crowd on the 
one hand, and with the superfine critic on 
the other, count very little with Him. 

Let me touch on one point more in this 
connection. If we have ability, brains, a gift 
of expression, some power of attraction, let us 
thank God for them: That is the real way to 


I2 


178 IN QUEST OF REALITY 


deal with them—not to pretend they are not 
there, or to grovel in a false humility. You 
know the old story—was it of Bunyan, who 
was congratulated on a good sermon he had 
preached? “I know,” he said; “‘the devil 
told me about it before I had left the pulpit.” 
That story is often repeated as a warning to 
ministers against vanity. But was it the 
devil? And what if it were true that the 
sermon was good? Is a man to pretend to 
himself, by way of keeping humble, that his 
work is not good when he knows it is ? You 
will often know when you have written or 
preached a good sermon, though sometimes, 
of course, you will not ; for the deepest re- 
actions to truth are always hidden from us. 
But, in general, you ought to know: it is our 
business to cultivate a conscience for good 
work ; to produce it, is part of the real satis- 
faction of faithful preaching. And you will 
preach a really good sermon—now and then ! 
The trouble is, of course, when your satis- 
faction stops there, and becomes am end in 
itself. That moment you are on the rocks. 
Yet there is a way—the only way—to escape 
the Scylla of vanity on the one hand, as well 
as the Charybdis of mortification on the 


THE PREACHER HIMSELF 179 


other. It is to recognize your gifts, thank 
God for them, consecrate them to His service, 
and take pleasure in them, but only as an 
asset for His Kingdom. Say to yourself, 
when you preach a sermon with which you 
are really satisfied, that you rejoice in it 
because thereby something of the wonder. 
and the glory of Christ found expression, and 
something of the truth of God was made 
clear. You will find in that a natural and 
quite real deliverance from self-conscious 
vanity, for the centre of the picture has been 
changed from yourself to Christ. The test 
of our real deliverance is, of course, when we 
rejoice as much in the good work of others 
as in our own, and are glad only that Christ 
has been preached ; and, above all, when we 
are content to fail if we have done our best, 
knowing that God can work through failure 
as through success—our joy being just in 
serving Him. What Kipling said of England 
during the war is true of the Kingdom of 
Gods (™ 
“Who lives if England dies ? 
Who dies if England lives ? ”’ 

In fact, the service of the Kingdom of God 
is the only thing of which it is true that 


180 IN QUEST OF REALITY 


perfect self-forgetfulness is perfect self-fulfil- 
ment. The release of personality in preaching 
is very largely the deliverance from self- 
consciousness. 

Believe me, these are things of which I 
speak with trembling. Yet I feel most 
deeply that they go to the heart of the whole | 
matter. The preacher who is not a good 
man will not be a good preacher. He may 
be popular; he will have no real power. 
The ministry is the last calling in which 
selfish ambition can make for success, for 
that ambition is the surest way to failure. 
It cuts the nerve of spiritual power. To be 
out for a career, in the ordinary sense of the 
word, is to lose touch with the Kingdom of 
God. ‘Thank God that He hath counted 
me worthy, putting me into the ministry.” 
The more we approximate to that position, 
the more will the joy of the Lord, which is the 
joy of creating new things and redeeming 
broken things, become our strength. 


Til 
Let me speak now of some of the qualities 
which preaching needs for its highest effective- 
ness. The first of these is sympathy. We 


THE PREACHER HIMSELF 181 


must be one with our people. We must 
know them, think with their thoughts, under- 
stand their outlook, put ourselves resolutely 
in their place. You remember Ezekiel when 
he went to speak to the exiles in Babylon. 
‘‘T went down by the river and I sat where 
they sat.’”’ Was that a literal getting into. 
their place, or was it only a metaphor for 
imaginative sympathy ? It must be both with 
us, and both at the same time. Imaginative 
sympathy is the quality we most need in 
pastoral visitation. It is the one way in 
which we shall be able to speak the word 
our people need for the healing of some 
wound or the quickening of some nerve. 
Lord Acton says of George Eliot: ‘‘ She had 
the secret not only of reading the diverse 
hearts of men but of creeping into their skins, 
watching the world with their eyes, feeling the 
latent background of conviction, discerning 
theory and habit ; and having obtained this 
experience, recovering her independence.” 
We must acquire this habit of sympathy if 
we have not already got it, till 1t become 
real and natural, and carefully cultivate it if 
it be a native gift. May I repeat again the 
suggestion’ that there are two kinds of 


182 IN QUEST OF REALITY 


ministers ?—the one more interested in ideas 
than he is in people; the other more inter- 
ested in! people than. he: is” imi@ideam 
This latter is the true minister. The last 
thing I would dream of is to cast any re- 
flection upon the scholarly minister whose 
real home is in the study, and who finds 
contact with people disturbing. He is doing 
his special work. Yet, in general, I think the 
definition stands, searching though it is to 
those of us who feel the fascination of a big 
subject and the adventure of working it out. 
It is people who must be foremost in our 
minds, people we can help with the truth, 
people to whom it will be the message from 
God. We must get to thinking out truth 
for our people with them in view, searching 
for it as a man on the moor might search for 
a lost child for the joy of finding it, but most 
of all for the joy of taking it home and re- 
storing it to the arms of its mother. Believe 
me, you will find a new glory in the truth 
when you have seen it kindling the light in 
some lack-lustre eye. Dr. Fraser tells in 
African Idylls how he put on his gramophone 
a record of the Hallelujah Chorus that a 
native might hear it. He describes the effect 


THE PREACHER HIMSELF 183 


on this man, and then adds: ‘‘ He went off, 
leaving me more solemnized by music than 
I had ever been before, for I had seen one to 
whom it had opened the gates of heaven 
and revealed the glories ineffable.’”’ An un- 
selfish interest in truth is a vital necessity for 
a preacher. It is the basis of the preacher's, 
passion. We will need sympathy if we are 
not to be accused of fumbling with men’s 
troubles, treating symptoms without getting 
to the roots of the disease, ‘‘ healing the hurt 
of the daughter of my people slightly,” 
offering a comfort that is no consolation, 
making a false appeal. We will need sym- 
pathy, even if we are going rightly to 
condemn. No man has any right to judge 
his fellows whose tongue is sharpened by 
censoriousness or by self-righteousness, or 
who is moved by anything less than the pain 
of his own shamed and saddened spirit, 
feeling the wrong he judges as if he had in 
some sort been responsible for it, or shared 
the guilt of it. That place of moral kinship 
with the one who is guilty is the only safe 
place of judgment, and that is the place of 
sympathy. It is not enough to be sorry fora 
man; we must be sorry with him, and ashamed 


184 IN QUEST OF REALITY 


with him, before indignation becomes a 
weapon of love. And that takes sympathy. 
Most of all it is by sympathy that we are 
helped to recover the evangelical passion 
when we have lost it, or when it has begun 
to flag. You will have a’unique experience 
if there do not come days when you ask 
yourself in some low mood: “‘ Why should I 
preach, after all? Why go on preaching ? 
After all, these people are living fairly good 
and harmless lives, and these others outside 
the churches seem to need very little that 
one can say to them, and seem to get on 
very well without religion. Why need we 
trouble ?’’ Moods like that come to us all. 
I am stating it bluntly because it is better 
to face facts. We banish them, of course, 
and they go after a longer or a shorter time. 
But perhaps in banishing them thus we have 
lost something, or taken for escape some 
lower ground on which we are content to 
stand, and become satisfied with preaching 
which is passionless and conventional. Now 
the real way to recover the evangelical 
passion, apart from the recovery of our own 
experience of the grace of God, is so to steep 
ourselves in the needs of others that the 





THE PREACHER HIMSELF 185 


gospel message takes new fire in our own 
hearts. It is to get into the lives of people, 
into their circumstances, to feel their pitiful 
futility, their trivial satisfactions, their un- 
easiness and hunger of spirit, their mean 
ambitions, their pathetic struggles, their 
sorrows; and every now and then, just 
because you are en vapport with people, you 
will get a sudden look into the abyss, where 
the ground opens at your very feet in some 
commonplace or apparently happy home. 
And with a thankful heart you will realize 
what it means to have a gospel, what it 
means to be “ delivered from the power of 
darkness and translated into the Kingdom of 
God’s dear Son, in whom we have redemp- 
tion through His blood, even the forgiveness 
of sins.”’ 

I have said that this habit of sympathy is 
one that can be acquired, apart even from 
our own actual experience of the same kind 
of trouble as that which calls it forth. This 
may seem doubtful. But there are instances 
to prove it. A curious fact is that those 
who look on from without at some trouble 
which others are bearing, may often feel its 
pain through imagination even more than 


186 IN QUEST OF REALITY 


those who are within it, because they feel 
the pain without at the same time sharing 
in the compensations which suffering often 
brings. There is an incident in Stevenson’s 
life which illustrates what I mean. One of 
his most bracing books was written at 
Bournemouth in the midst of paralysing 
weakness. A hemorrhage prevented him 
from speaking, an attack of writer’s cramp 
from writing, and his eyesight was also 
affected by some temporary malady; but 
he dictated the book to his wife by means 
of the dummy alphabet! One can hardly 
imagine any situation more devastating to 
a brave outlook on life. When the book 
was published a critic attacked its philosophy 
on the ground that the man who wrote it 
could have had little experience of the 
sterner side of life. Stevenson wrote him, 
describing the actual conditions under which 
the book was done, whereupon the critic 
replied that in that case he must have been 
writing it with his tongue in his cheek. 
Stevenson’s answer to this was that a specta- 
tor of some trouble may often feel it more 
than one who is experiencing it, because he 
knows nothing of the interior consolations, 


THE PREACHER HIMSELF 187 


Experience, of course, is one of the ways 
in which God can soften our hearts to the 
pain of others, but it is not essential. If we 
are willing to think ourselves into the situa- 
tion of others, we can acquire the habit of 
sympathy. A case in point is that of Dale 
of Birmingham. His son describes it thus: 
“He was not selfish, but he was apt to be 
self-absorbed, engrossed by his own thoughts, 
and so abstracted as to be heedless of those 
whom he met, and of what was going on 
around him. His nature was not sym- 
pathetic. The faculty so freely bestowed on 
some, he had to cultivate sedulously and 
patiently, as one of the moral virtues. And 
as it not infrequently happens, the faculty 
thus acquired proved the stronger and richer 
for the effort and trouble it had cost in the 
winning.” 

In what I have said above I have sug- 
gested, without stating it in so many words, 
what sympathy is. But it is well before 
we leave the subject to ask what real 
sympathy is. For until we see what it is, 
we cannot make it really effective. What 
does it mean to have sympathy, for instance, 
with a person who has just discovered that 


188 IN QUEST OF REALITY 


he has become a victim to cancer? Or 
with one who is facing irretrievable ruin in 
business ? Or with another whose home is 
stricken by sorrow after sorrow? Sympathy 
is not merely feeling with another in his 
suffering. We may feel and feel deeply, 
entering with heart and imagination into his 
situation, in a way that really makes us one 
with him in his pain. We may express our 
sympathy with him in words or in deeds 
that are very tender and bring a real sense 
of the consolation of friendship, which in 
itself can be a veritable ministry of God. 
He will find comfort in the sense that’he is 
not alone, which is the lesson that, as legend 
tells us, Buddha taught the woman who had 
lost her child and was grief stricken. He 
sent her to seek a black mustard seed, which, 
however, she must not take from a house 
where any one had died. The comfort he 
meant her to find was, of course, the know- 
ledge that sorrow is the burden of all, and 
so her grief might grow less by the sense 
that it was shared. But that kind of 
sympathy is not the deepest or truest. Our 
depth and poignancy of feeling, for instance, 
may only come from the secret sense that 


THE PREACHER HIMSELF 189 


we have no real remedy, and that in the like 
case we would be in hopeless despair. This 
seems very subtle, but any minister who 
looks into his own heart will realize how true 
it is. Effective sympathy goes deeper. It 
means not only feeling with sorrow, but also 
facing it with God ourselves and finding in 
Him the answer to the trouble; it goes forth 
then to the sufferer holding out a hand 
which has grasped the hand of God and so 
is strong to minister real comfort. We dare 
not go to another in pain or sorrow except 
in the strength of a faith that has touched 
rock-bottom and found it secure. That kind 
of sympathy is not less tender, but there is 
strength also in it, and the light of victory, 
and the confidence that, having overcome 
the world in this special instance of its power 
to wound, it carries with it the sure secret 
of the power to overcome. 

This, of course, seems to have more particu- 
lar reference to our pastoral work. But it 
holds also in our preaching. In point of 
fact, our power in the pulpit is only an ex- 
tension of the same personal intimacy which 
gives us power in individual dealings. Unless 
we can bridge the distance between the pulpit 


190 IN QUEST OF REALITY 


and the pew by this intimate sympathy, our 
preaching will be of none effect. It will be 
but “ sounding brass or a tinkling cymbal.” 
Another quality we shall need is confidence 
in our message. Think of Jesus for a moment 
in this connection. How He went about 
saying, to this one and that one, great, 
miraculous, unbelievable things, like ‘‘ Thy 
sins be forgiven thee’ to a man whose past 
was like a mountain wall; and ‘“‘ Take up 
thy bed and walk” to a lifelong cripple ; 
and “ Your Father knoweth that ye have 
need ” to people who were mere insignificant 
things in a merciless world. They just took 
it for granted, and amazing things happened. 
There must have been in Him, and in His 
quiet utterance and manner, a confidence 
that produced the conviction that the thing 
He was saying was real—no dream, no 
formula, no vague hope of better things. 
And this confidence somehow communicated 
itself to the people to whom He spoke, so 
that they “believed in His belief.’’ With- 
out doubt, the power of Jesus to break the 
chain of moral impotence which bound many 
people, was that He gave them power, 
through His very faith in them, to believe 


THE PREACHER HIMSELF 191 


in themselves. Was not His message to 
people, after all, just the possibility of good- 
ness, of purity, of victory there and then ; 
the sense that they were living in a spiritual 
world, in which they had only to begin to 
draw breath, without any magical rites or 
purifications? Of course this simple call to 
people to begin to live a natural, spiritual 
life was made in full view of the resources 
which are in God to meet their need, at 
work for them, and in Him able to make 
all things possible. When He told a man 
his sins were forgiven, the man accepted 
the fact as Christ meant him to do; and 
when He bade the lame man walk, the 
lame man did it without any more ado 
than if He had asked him to eat his break- 
fast. Christ expected this response, and the 
man never had any doubt the thing would 
happen. Have we this confidence and the 
power of imparting it? When we tell people 
that if only they come to Christ their lives 
will be changed, do we believe it? Do we 
believe that faith in God will enable a man 
to face the impossible ? Do we believe in 
the wonderful things which we claim for the 
gospel? I sometimes wonder if the im- 


192 IN QUEST OF REALITY 


potence of the message does not often spring 
from a latent scepticism in the preacher's 
heart. We have to be on our guard against 
this. Nothing so quickly communicates 
itself to others as the subconscious mood 
of doubt or unbelief. Indeed, it is a question 
whether what we are in those dim regions 
of our spirit does not speak so loudly, awaken- 
ing suggestions and raising questions in the 
minds of those to whom we speak, that they 
cannot hear what we say. The same, I 
would add, is true of public prayer, though 
this forms no part of our subject. There is 
a subtle scepticism which often slays reality. 
It is good sometimes to put to ourselves the 
questions: Do I really mean this? Is this 
really true? Do I expect these things to 
happen? Would we be more rejoiced or 
more nonplussed if there should be an 
invasion some Sunday night into the vestry 
of one or another challenging us? “Is what 
you have been saying to-night a fact? How 
can I really secure the gift? ’’ There is little 
doubt but that the attitude of expectancy 
on our part communicates itself to the 
people. If you expect things to happen, 
you have produced the atmosphere in which 


THE PREACHER HIMSELF 193 


things do happen, whether you hear of it 
before the Day of Judgment or not. 

Again, the preacher must be whole-hearted. 
It is woefully possible to do our work with 
half our personality asleep or unemployed. 
The psychologists are telling us that few 
people ever work up to the level of their 
innate possibilities. We have to bring our 
whole mind to the preparation of a sermon 
for one thing. It is no good going on with 
the full extension of our notes till our whole 
capacity for thought and feeling has been 
brought to bear on it. The illuminating 
moment, when we reach, as it were, the crest 
of the hill and see the landscape of truth 
stretching out in various directions, only 
comes when our whole mind is in the subject. 
Nearly every man who deals with preaching 
condemns laziness as our besetting sin. How 
much this is due to lack of concentration, 
so that the immediate trifling things get first 
call and keep us busy on futilities, and how 
much to indolence, is a question. Indo- 
lence, however, is rooted in lack of vital 
interest. There is a certain amount of 
drudgery which must be got through, and 
for that there is nothing but to set our face 

13 


194 IN QUEST OF REALITY 


and go through with it. But where our 
whole interest is engaged we do not think 
of the toil, and do not require to whip our- 
selves to our task. We think nothing either 
of time or effort when we are busy at our 
hobby. Our wills follow the path of our 
interest. Preaching may begin to lack 
interest because from our very conscientious- 
ness to do the work well, religion becomes 
isolated as our special department, and not 
the key to all our interests. Our work comes 
to have the feel of an external duty, in which 
our whole nature is not running freely and 
harmoniously. That seems to me to be 
nearest the truth. 

However it comes about, if we are not in 
our work—all we are and all the time—the 
defect is fatal. The hours of study must 
be rigidly guarded. Some people inveigh 
against the slavery of turning out two 
sermons a week. It seems to me that for 
many preachers the necessity has been in- 
valuable. I have never found that I pro- 
duced a better sermon when I had, by some 
chance, only one to prepare. Most of us 
work better under pressure. ‘‘ A man’s work 
may be his best life preserver,’’ some one 


THE PREACHER HIMSELF 195 


has said. It is eminently true of the preacher. 
In the preparation of a sermon, let us be in 
it whole-heartedly, with every scrap of 
capacity, imagination, memory, ingenuity, 
that we have. 

This brings me to say that true preaching 
demands abandonment. It means giving > 
ourselves away. Some of us are so afraid 
of what a good elder of mine calls “ spilling 
over.’ We consciously reserve ourselves. 
That is all right at the beginning of a sermon. 
But when the truth gets hold of us and we 
want to express it, for any sake never mind 
the proprieties. We must think of our 
message and of the people, and let every- 
thing else go. We may often say a foolish 
thing, and an exaggerated thing, in the heat 
of themoment. The people would far rather 
have the heat than the precision of calculated 
statement. And the heat of a great truth is 
often part of the true statement of it, though 
emotional expression differs. But do not be 
afraid of giving yourself away. How that 
self-giving will shape itself is a matter of 
temperament. But aloofness has generally 
something unnatural behind it. It may be 
that just the act of breaking free of all the 


196 IN QUEST OF REALITY 


entanglements of nervousness, whatever they 
are, may be the best means of snapping the 
bondage of self-consciousness. I remember 
in the first year of my ministry how I was 
taken to task by one of the most gifted laymen 
the Presbyterian Church in Scotland has 
ever> had, the late. Dr.: Taylor’ Innes 
had preached what I felt was rather a poor 
sermon. He happened to be in the con- 
gregation, and kindly asked me to come 
and see him next day, which I gladly did. 
“Now,” he said genially, ““I am going to 
talk to you, for I am rather an authority on 
preaching. I once lectured to the New 
College Theological Society at their opening 
meeting, with Principal Rainy in the chair, 
on ‘ Why are our New College students not 
good preachers?” ”. Then he went #onm-: 
“You thought that was rather a poor sermon 
last night ?*? "Yes; To said’ Yes iam 
went on, “‘ you very successfully communi- 
cated that to the congregation. Well, you 
are going to ruin your ministry just there. 
If you have done your best with a sermon, 
whether you think it good or not, take it as 
a message and give it a chance. Put your- 
self into it with all its seeming defects. More 


THE PREACHER HIMSELF 197 


promising preachers fail through this want 
of abandonment than for any other cause.” 
I pass on this counsel for what it is worth. 
I think it is worth a good deal. Of course 
it is dangerous advice. To a fool, all the 
best advice is dangerous. The gospel itself 
is the most dangerous of doctrines—the 
gospel of forgiveness and the grace of God. 
There is always the danger that advice like 
that of Dr. Innes may make a fool imagine 
that bluster will take the place of brain, or 
that man will hear us—any more than God— 
for our much or our loud speaking. But the 
advice is sound. We must give ourselves 
away in our preaching, caring for nothing, 
so long as we get the truth home. 

“© the gravity, the seriousness, the in- 
cessant diligence which these things require,” 
wrote Richard Baxter. “I am ashamed 
that such astonishing matters do not wholly 
absorb my mind. I seldom come out of the 
pulpit but my conscience reproacheth me 
that I have been no more serious and fervent 
in such a case. It accuseth me, not so much 
for want of ornaments or elegancy, nor for 
letting fall an unhandsome word; but it 
asketh me, How couldst thou speak of life 


198 IN QUEST OF REALITY 


and death with such a heart ? Truly this is 
the peal which conscience doth ring in our 
ears. O Lord, do Thou that on our own 
souls which Thou wouldst use us to do on 
the souls of others.” 

This giving of ourselves is no easy thing. 
It involves sacrifice. Francis Thompson says 
that “Every poem is a human sacrifice.” 
Joseph Parker said that “‘ Preaching is the 
sweating of blood.’”’ Both mean the same 
thing. And what does the New Testament 
say of Jesus, summing up His life and death 
in one act. He gave Himself. It will mean 
sacrifice for us. Through the whole service 
of the ministry, what we do for people in any 
real and helpful way is just to give them 
ourselves. And only as that is done sacri- 
ficially, in the unselfish spirit of Christ, will 
the alabaster box be broken and the house 
be filled with the odour of the ointment. 


It.all comes to this, does it not? Wecan 
only help people, only bring them into touch 
with redeeming love, in the measure in 
which we mediate, through our preaching, 
the Spirit of Christ. You cannot account 
for Christ’s power with men by His message 


THE PREACHER HIMSELF 199 


alone. It was Himself giving it, Himself 
saying these words, and Himself creating 
the atmosphere by His Spirit in which great 
truths become believable, and the step of 
trust and faith is taken. In the same way, 
you cannot account for the success of the 
apostles, bringing men and women under the 
power of the gospel and casting out devils, 
except by the fact that their lives suggested 
Jesus. Stephen’s preaching helped, no doubt, 
to stake a claim for Christ in Paul’s mind, 
but it was Stephen’s death suggesting Jesus 
and setting His Spirit free, that made the 
final conquest. “‘In the name of Jesus of 
Nazareth,” said Peter to the lame man, “ I 
say unto thee, Rise up and walk.” The name 
could hardly be enough. There must have 
been something in the whole quality of Peter's 
personality that revealed Jesus. A preacher 
in his preaching must mediate Jesus, mind 
and soul together, or there is no possibility 
of a miracle. We must convey the sense of 
God’s forgiveness, His friendship, His sym- 
pathy with outcast men, His challenge to 
people—not merely use words about it. And 
that means we must feel these things our- 
selves, and have the same attitude as He 


200 IN QUEST OF REALITY 


towards the people to whom we are speaking, 
or little of the sense of spiritual realities will 
filter through our words or shape our language 
into a channel for God’s grace. It is just 
here that the prophet becomes the priest in 
any healthy sense, where the message is able 
to mould men, because it has first of all 
moulded us into a medium, where “ mind and 
soul, according well, may make one music.”’ 
Let me recapitulate. Our task is to make 
real, God in Christ, so as to bring into fellow- 
ship with Him, people who are estranged 
from Him in wrong thinking, in wrong 
desires, in wrong attitudes to life, and in 
wrong relations to one another. “‘ We are 
ambassadors for Christ,’ says Paul. “‘ We 
therefore beseech men, in Christ’s stead, to 
be reconciled to God.’ That must be the 
whole spirit of our preaching. “ We are 
ambassadors’’: we represent God in a world 
where He is misunderstood. ‘“‘ We beseech 
men’’: that is our final weapon. “ In Christ’s 
stead’’: that is our tremendous responsibility 
and our privilege alike—to reveal Jesus in 
all our ministry. Our only glory is to be like 
Him. ‘‘ Wherefore he that hath this hope in 
him, purifieth himself, even as He is pure.” 











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